The Idea of Europe

The creation of the European Union and the progressive integration of

the European states have raised serious questions about the existence of
a distinctive European identity. If there is something that distinguishes all
Europeans, no matter their national or local differences, what is it, and how
is it being changed by recent events? This book addresses these questions in
essays that range from ancient Greece to the end of the twentieth century.
They discuss matters of politics, law, religion, culture, literature, and even
affectivity. In the massive literature of European integration, no other book
takes such a long historical perspective, and none other deals directly with
the question of identity.
Anthony Pagden is a professor of history and political science at The Johns
Hopkins University. He is the author of many books on the history of
European social and political thought and of Europes links to the
non-European world.

WOODROW WILSON
CENTER SERIES

Michael J. Lacey, editor, Religion and Twentieth-Century American

Intellectual Life
Michael J. Lacey, editor, The Truman Presidency
Joseph Kruzel and Michael H. Haltzel, editors, Between the Blocs:
Problems and Prospects for Europes Neutral and Nonaligned States
William C. Brumfield, editor, Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western
Technology, Utopian Dreams
Mark N. Katz, editor, The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third
World
Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple, editors, The State and Economic
Knowledge: The American and British Experiences
Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen, editors, A Culture of Rights:
The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law1791 and 1991
Robert J. Donovan and Ray Scherer, Unsilent Revolution: Television News
and American Public Life, 19481991
William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, editors, Russian Housing in
the Modern Age: Design and Social History
Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, editors, Industrial
Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise
Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, editors, The State and Social
Investigation in Britain and the United States
Hugh Ragsdale, editor, Imperial Russian Foreign Policy
Dermot Keogh and Michael H. Haltzel, editors, Northern Ireland and
the Politics of Reconciliation
Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, editors, The Global Ramifications
of the French Revolution
Rene Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide
James R. Millar and Sharon L. Wolchik, editors, The Social Legacy of
Communism
James M. Morris, editor, On Mozart
Blair A. Ruble, Money Sings: The Changing Politics of Urban Space in
Post-Soviet Yaroslavl

Continued on page following index

WOODROW WILSON
INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS

Lee H. Hamilton, Director

BOARD OF TRUSTEES
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Conrad Cafritz, Nicola L. Caiola, Raoul L. Carroll, Scott Carter, Albert V. Casey, Peter B.
Clark, William T. Coleman, Jr., Michael D. DiGiacomo, Donald G. Drapkin, F. Samuel
Eberts III, J. David Eller, Sim Farar, Susan R. Farber, Barbara Hackman Franklin, Morton
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Deborah Wince-Smith, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr., Joseph Zappala.

ABOUT THE CENTER

The Center is the living memorial of the United States of America to the nations twentyeighth president, Woodrow Wilson. Congress established the Woodrow Wilson Center in
1968 as an international institute for advanced study, symbolizing and strengthening the
fruitful relationship between the world of learning and the world of public affairs. The
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The Idea of Europe

From Antiquity to the
European Union
Edited by

ANTHONY PAGDEN
The Johns Hopkins University

WOODROW WILSON CENTER PRESS

AND


Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20004-3027

For Felix and Sebastian, citizens of Europe

Anthony Pagden

Contents

Acknowledgments

page xi

Introduction
Anthony Pagden

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

Anthony Pagden

33

Some Europes in Their History

J. G. A. Pocock

55

Europe in the Middle Ages

William Chester Jordan

72

The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe

Hans W. Blom

91

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

Biancamaria Fontana

116

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus:

The European Citizen According to Max Weber
Wilfried Nippel

129

The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude

Michael Herzfeld

139

European Nationalism and European Union

Ariane Chebel dAppollonia

171

From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony

Luisa Passerini

191

ix

Contents

10

11

12

13

14

15

Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe

Represent Islam?
Talal Asad

209

The Long Road to Unity: The Contribution of Law

to the Process of European Integration since 1945
Philip Ruttley

228

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and the Question

of National Sovereignty
Elie Cohen

260

Identity Politics and European Integration:

The Case of Germany
Thomas Risse and Daniela Engelmann-Martin

287

Nationalisms in Spain: The Organization

of Convivencia
Andres de Blas Guerrero

317

The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and

Cosmopolitan Perspectives
James Tully

331

Contributors
Index

359
363

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book originated with an invitation from James Morris, at
that time with the Woodrow Wilson Center, to present the first in a series
of public lectures on the idea of Europe. What have subsequently become
the chapters by J. G. A. Pocock, James Tully, and Biancamaria Fontana all
began as lectures in the same series. I would like to thank James Morris
not only for this initiative but also for organizing and hosting a conference
at the Center that brought together a number of the other contributors to
discuss the future shape and direction of the volume. This was sponsored
with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the
United States Federal Conference Fund. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to Susan Nugent who has been a constant source of assistance in any
number of ways during the long and often torturous period of the books
gestation, to Joe Brinley for all his patience and encouragement, and to
Patricia Katayama and Barbara de Boinville for their care in preparing the
text for publication. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University
Press made a number of suggestions that have greatly helped to improve

the volume. Finally, I would like to thank Jose Maria Hernandez

for his
friendship and for having reminded me of the presence of the smaller
nations in Europe, and Giulia Sissa, another good European, who has
influenced greatly what I think on this, and many other topics, and who
has saved me from innumerable errors.
Anthony Pagden

xi

Introduction
ANTHONY PAGDEN

Today, as the older territorial and national boundaries of the world become increasingly uncertain, the quest for national and transnational
identity has intensified. This, as Talal Asad observes in chapter 10, is a
fairly recent phenomenon, the product of the individuals social locations
and psychological crises in an increasingly uncertain world. Previously,
anxieties about identity tended to afflict only states of relatively recent
creationthe so-called new states in Africa and Asia in particular
and areas of massive and diverse emigration such as the United States.1
The states that made up Europe, however, had supposedly been of such
antiquity and undisputed cultural homogeneity that their members rarely
troubled to ask themselves who they were.2 But the experience of two
world wars, combined with ever-increasing migration for political, economic, or broadly cultural motives across the rapidly dissolving frontiers
of Europe, have forced upon Europeans the uneasy sense that their selfconfidence in knowing just who they are is almost certainly unfounded.
This volume traces from the ancient world to the present the determining features of what might count as a collective idea of Europe as
a political and cultural domain. This is not, of course, a linear history.
No such history could be written. Our objective is rather to identify the
concerns and convictions, the shifting discursive practices and the different languages, political, cultural, and economic, of which all identities
are constituted. The contributors represent different disciplineshistory,
anthropology, political science, the lawas they do different intellectual
styles. Some (J. G. A. Pocock, Talal Asad, and James Tully in particular)
1

On identity in the new states, see Clifford Geertz, After the Revolution: The Fate
of Nationalism in the New States, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973), 23454.
See Thomas Risse and Daniela Engelmann-Martins chapter in this volume.

ANTHONY PAGDEN

look at Europe from beyond Europe, and their gaze is highly critical
of both what Europe has been and what it is now becoming. Others
(Ariane Chebel dAppollonia, Luisa Passerini, Thomas Risse and Daniela
Engelmann-Martin, Biancamaria Fontana), while accepting the obvious
burdens and contradictions of the European past, are cautiously hopeful
about the possibilities of a new and happier European future. The volume
offers no attempt to solve Europes current dilemmas. Its purpose is rather
to add an historical voice to a conversation that has been going on within
Europe and outside for several decades, a conversation that will shape a
new, potentially exciting, potentially threatening, political, cultural, and
social order. Most of us, whether we belong to Europe itself or (like some
of the contributors to this volume) to other parts of the Western world,
which Europe has played such an important role in shaping, will have to
learn to live with this order. It is time we also came to understand it.
For decades there has been within Western Europe an ever-insistent
suspicion that the days of the nation-state are numbered. This, at least for
the foreseeable future, is largely an illusion. Politically and institutionally
the state remains the final term of reference. As the general enthusiasm
for the unification of Germany demonstrated, the state is still capable
of arousing a great deal of popular attachment, even among one of the
most Europhile of Europes peoples.3 In the minds of such East German
politicians as Wolfgang Thierse, former leader of the Eastern SPD and
subsequently speaker of the German parliament, there may be an insoluble
link between unification and Europeanization. But if his position is to
be at all coherent, Thierses vision of the future United States of Europe
must still be one in which the individual states retain a great measure of
their former identity as nations.4
Even if the nation-state is not about to vanish, the erosion of its effective powers within what now constitutes the European Union has been
considerable. As Philip Ruttley explains in his essay on the process of unification after 1945 (chapter 11), the institutions of the Union, the European
Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice
have, as the Euroskeptics bitterly complain, greatly diminished the authority of local assemblies and national judiciaries.5 Beyond Europe, too,
3
4

Andres de Blas Guerrero reminds us of this point in chapter 14.

In their chapter Risse and Engelmann-Martin write that the United States of Europe
are not seen as a unitary state with a strong central government, but as a distinctively
federalist order. . . . The model is the Bonn republic, not Paris and the Fifth Republic.
See William Wallace, Rescue or Retreat? The Nation State in Western Europe, 194593,
in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson, eds., The Question of Europe (LondonNew York:
Verso, 1997), 2146.

Introduction

globalization has shrunk the operational capacity of the state by transferring a great deal of its previous informal authority to private, and
necessarily multinational, institutions.
All of this is obvious enough. Whether you view it with dismay or
pleasure depends on which side of a number of political and cultural
fences you happen to sit. All people, not only Europeans, must share some
anxiety over whether the successor to this now long-standing political
and social institution will turn out to be a mega-state, a federation of
minor states, or merely a political corporation. In the midst of this shifting
political landscape, most of the peoples of Europe are participants in a
vast and far-ranging political, economic, and cultural experiment. No
one has any clear idea of the outcome. But, as Thomas Risse and Daniela
Engelmann-Martin stress, it will beindeed, if it is to succeed, it must
bedependent upon the image of a newer and better political order, one
that ultimately can replace the older alignment of peoples. This alignment
dates back to the Congress of Vienna, and, as Biancamaria Fontana argues
in chapter 5 on the legacy of the Napoleonic wars, it set the scene for
many of the divergences and contradictions that still beset the attempt
to create a united Europe. Most, too, will recognize that some of the
divisions in Europe established even earlier by the confessional struggles
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesdivisions between Protestants
and Catholics, between an industrialized, capitalist, and predominantly
republican North and a largely agricultural, quasi-feudal if not exactly
monarchical and ultimately backward Southare vanishing and that in
their place a new sense of what it means to be European is slowly and
uncertainly emerging. The very thought that it might be useful to talk of
a European identity, which even those who most abhor the idea do so if
only reactively, has become a source of anxiety.

GOVERNMENT

That there exists such a place as Europe has been evident to those who
inhabit it since the fourth century BCE if not earlier. At first Europe
designated a vague geographical region distinguished less by what it was
than what it was not. In time, however, this sense of difference, of being
unlike the other regions into which the world was divided, became more
distinct. One feature of this difference, which in various ways has remained constant over time, is the belief that Europeans have always pursued roughly similar political ends. The forms of government adopted
by the different peoples of the continent have, of course, varied widely.

A NTHONY P AGDEN

But all of the governments have subscribed to the idea that freedom of
individual choice and protection by a universal system of law was the
necessary condition for what the Greeks defined as the good life. From
the Greek geographer Strabo in the first century CE until Montesquieu in
the eighteenth, observers of the peculiar identity of Europe have fastened
upon some conception of liberty as the defining feature of all the societies
of Europeor at least, as J. G. A. Pocock in his pluralist view of Europe
rightly insistsall the societies of the Christian Latin West.6 This belief
in liberty has been most closely identified with the republican and democratic traditions that originated in ancient Greece. In Europe, claimed
Machiavelli, although there have been some kingdoms, there have been
many republics. The peoples of Asia and Africa, by contrast, had only
ever lived under princely rule. Machiavelli was being unduly optimistic
even at a timethe late fifteenth centurywhen the republican tradition
was still a powerful force within Italy. But even if most of Europe has,
for much of its history, been ruled by monarchs, they have generally
accepted two basic principles: first, that their subjects were free persons,
in the sense of not being their personal property; second, that although
the laws they enacted might be nothing other than the expression of their
will, all rulers were nevertheless bound by a higher legal order. This legal
order was, it is true, held to be derived from God and immanent in nature rather than dependent upon the legislative will of the majority, and
for that reason was infinitely malleable. But since the natural and divine
law provided a court of final appeal that was beyond the reach of even
the mightiest ruler, it constrained the power of kings. In the end these
two principles provided the ideological grounding for the revolution that
would alter the conception and the practice of power within Europe at
the end of the eighteenth century and would bring into being a world that
was and would remain, despite the restorations of the nineteenth century,
fundamentally republican.
There was also the generally shared belief that power, although it derived from God, was conferred upon kings by a contract with the people.
The force of this contract (and its nature) varied greatly. But no European
monarch in theory wielded personalized or unfettered power. The history of social life, and the political realities of most (if not all) European
states since the collapse of the Roman Empire, might suggest that such
conceptions of the sources of authority had very little enduring significance. Freedom, even under the law, was the freedom only of the few.
6

On this point see also my chapter and the one by Biancamaria Fontana.

Introduction

(It excluded in most cases most women and all children.) The existence
of slavery was accepted as part of nature, and even the emphasis of
Christianity on the equality of all human beings in Christ (if not in society)
did little to change this. Martin Luther famously warned Christian slaves
against stealing themselves away from their rightful Muslim masters.
The possibility for self-determination on the part of the vast majority
of the population was further constricted by systems of land tenure and
indenture, and by semisacred hierarchies based on kin and patrimonial
succession. Nevertheless, ideologies associated with a contractualist view
of political association, in particular after the great religious and civil disturbances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exerted a constant
pressure on all the European monarchies, which not infrequently led to
open warfare and in some cases the death of the ruler himself. And in
most cases these ideologies drew their inspiration from forms of Greek
and Roman republicanism. Belief in a monarchs divine origins or divine
right was never anything but unstable.
Some kind of republicanism had, therefore, always been a presence
in the politics of early modern Europe. But it was the emergence of the
Dutch republic and its enormous political and commercial success that
led, as Hans Blom explains (chapter 4), to a new kind of political idiom,
one that was essentially modern and commercial. The merchants Pieter
and Johann de la Court, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and (in a rather
different idiom) the humanist Hugo Grotius all stressed the need for a
form of government that would not, as the republics of the ancient world
had supposedly done, demand the involvement of the entire citizen body
in the life of the state. Instead, through the rule of law and government
by a representative elite, it would protect the interests, in particular the
economic interests, of the citizen body. In the highly modified shape of
modern liberal democracy, the Dutch reevaluation of the republican creed
has, of course, proved to be triumphantas well as triumphalist.
The history of belief that the constitutional state, based upon representation and universal suffrage, is a determining feature of European
political life began with the emergence, after 1648 in England, of what
Montesquieu identified as a quasi-republican government hidden beneath a monarchy. It then passed through the various republicanisms
of Jefferson, Rousseau, and Kant, to the liberal monarchism of Benjamin
Constant and Tocqueville, Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill, and
Giuseppe Mazzinito name but a few. Today its most powerful defenders are North American, but it has, for the entire Western world,
become normative. Failure to conform to the standards of what the

A NTHONY P AGDEN

Chinese leader Deng Hsiao Ping called contemptuously the bourgeois

liberal republic7 is what excluded Spain and Portugal from inclusion in
the original European Economic Community, and it is at least one of the
reasons for Turkeys continuing exclusion from the European Union.
Of course, not all Europeans have consistently taken this view. The
English liberal historians of the nineteenth century had such an understanding of the history of England but not of most of continental Europe.
The narratives of Jules Michelet and Louis Adolphe Thiers, by contrast,
claimed for the French Revolution a transformative phase that in some
sense had restored Europe to its ancient foundations within an essentially republican tradition. On these accounts, monarchiesor at least the
would-be absolutist monarchies of Louis XIV, Charles II, and Frederick
the Greatwere aberrations in a story that reached from the Greek citystates to the Europe of nations created after the Congress of Vienna.
Today, however, another dimension has been added, one we owe to
Kant. It has become, as James Tully says in his critical assessment of
European constitutionalism (chapter 15), a regulative idea during the
two centuries since the publication of Perpetual Peace a Philosophical
Sketch in 1795. This is the assumption that all modern states (by which
is generally meant Western and thus ultimately European states) can form
themselves into some kind of league. In the past such leagues have usually
been the response to some possible exterior threat (as indeed was the case
in Kants hypothetical future great federation). The European Union,
although it was not in origin defensive (the planned European Defensive
Council of the 1950s came to nothing), was also conceived with the initial
intention of preventing further conflict between the European states.8
The possibility of any kind of federal structure, however, was based
upon the assumption of common political practices and values by the
member states. In Kants case these were the values of what he called the
representative republic, a term that has widely been assumed to correspond, mutatis mutandis, to modern social democracy. In Kants view
the true cosmopolitan constitution would become possible only once
all the societies of the world were ruled by republican and representative
governments. This has led to the claim, now a commonplace of international relations theory, that not only do liberal democracies not go to
7

See John Dunn, The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic, in Biancamaria Fontana,
ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 20625.
See David McKay, Federalism and the European Union: A Political Economy Perspective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 336.

Introduction

war with one another, they also actively cooperate for one anothers wellbeing. Thisthe capacity for international cooperationhas become, in
Tullys words, a normative standard against which many people organize and evaluate forms of political association in Europe and throughout
the world. Like so many other regulative ideas, this is at best an illusion. That the democratic states of western Europe have not gone to
war with one another cannot be taken as normative. The democratic
or quasi-democratic republics of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and
Latin America have rarely shown any reluctance to make ferocious wars
against their neighbors. Nor, of course, have the new democratic and
quasi-democratic states of Eastern Europe.
The obvious empirical weakness of the idea has not detracted from its
great influence in the creation of the idea of modern Europe as a continent that, if it only adheres to the principles of liberal democracy, will
never collapse into internal warfare. The initial and prime objective of
Europe as a political (and economic) conception is to ensure peace
an objective it shares with Kants cosmopolitan order. The founders of
what was to become the European Economic Community sought above
all to suppress the horrors of two world wars, initiated by Europeans and
fought between European states and their overseas dependencies. The
consequences of the second war continue to have a momentous impact
on European consciousness.9 The concern to create a Europe that would
no longer be prey to internal conflict has been the foundation of many
postwar foreign policy objectives. This has sometimes reached apocalyptic levels, as Risse and Englemann-Martin show, in particular among the
Germans, and to a lesser degree the Italians, as the perpetrators of much
of the horrors associated with nationalism in Europe. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, went so far as to argue in 1997 that the success of the
European Monetary Union (EMU) was a question of war and peace
and Joschka Fischer, a Green party leader in the Bundestag at the time,
claimed that the only alternative to an early start of the Euro was a return to the European past of power balancing and nationalism.10 Kohl
and presumably Fischer both knew, as had Kant, that a union based solely
upon mutual economic intereststhe commercial society of the eighteenth centuryor a union organized merely for defense would never be
9
10

Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1994),
4.
Risse and Engelmann-Martin observe that in Germany the new Europe is seen primarily as a stable peace order in almost Kantian terms of a pacific federation combining
cooperation with external partners with liberal democracy internally.

A NTHONY P AGDEN

sufficiently compelling in the long run to suppress the murderous instincts

of humankind.
Only what Kant called the ideal civil constitution could achieve that.
Kants universal cosmopolitan existence . . . as the matrix within which
all the original capacities of the human race may develop was firmly
located, however, in the future. It was, as he said, a sweet dream. But
the modern conception of Europe is no dream. If Romano Prodi is right,
it might bring into being a community that is, in Prodis words, more
open to civil society and to the citizen body, less obsessed with party pride
and more concerned with bringing together diverse positions in a project
of government which will operate at all levels, than was any of its more
ideological predecessors.11
Like the intellectual architects of todays Europe, Jean Monnet, Robert
Schuman, and Altiero Spinelli, Kant was looking for a way to reduce the
possibilities for conflict between sovereign bodies. Unlike them, however,
he had his gaze fixed upon the entire world. But in practice his cosmopolitan right could have applied only to Europe because he sought
a union of states and, in the opinion of many, true states have been the
dominant mode of political association, at least before the nineteenth century, only within Europe. This belief in the uniqueness of the state, like
every other component of the discourse of European exceptionalism, has
its origins in the ancient Greek, and later Roman world. In his massive
attempt to capture the unique identity of European civilization, the great
German sociologist Max Weber identified the ancient conception of citizenship as the defining feature of the modern state. As Wilfried Nippel
explains in chapter 6, this involved the creation of a community which

he [Weber] calls Verbruderung

(confraternity), a community based on artificially created and freely willed mutual ties, not on consanguinity. This
community, furthermore, conferred identity upon all those who entered
into it. It was, that is, transformational, and as such it could change over
time, which, in Webers view, the kin-based civilizations of the other great
polities of the world, China and India, could not do.
The statethe Greek polis and the Roman civitasdetermined the
shape of all future political associations in what has come to be called
Europe. After the collapse of the Roman world, however, somewhat different political arrangements came into existence: free city-states, princebishoprics, independent bands of knights, military orders, a Church whose
11

Romano Prodi, Unidea dellEurope. Il valore Europe per modernizzare lItalia (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1999), 8.

Introduction

power and influence reached into most parts of the continent, and an
Empire whose emperor was only the first among equals (primus inter
pares). But the modern nation-state, as a concept, emerged out of the
sixteenth-century ambition to define, in William Chester Jordans words,
a national essence, never actually lost but hidden sometimes under the
debris of anarchy and, at other times, under Catholic and Imperial universalism (chapter 3). It emerged, too, from an increasing need to establish
a world of security after the confessional conflicts that devastated much
of the continent between 1562 and 1648. This could be achieved only
by limitingand consolidatingthe sovereignty of national rulers. As
J. G. A. Pocock observes (chapter 2), the familiar Enlightened narrative
that makes gunpowder, the printing press, and the compass seminal inventions tends to be associated with the discovery of America, but for
Voltaire and Hume and Robertson, they had a prior importancetheir
role in the creation of powerful military monarchies controlling their own
resources, pursuing their own policies, and capable of acting independently of the papal Church.
Although most of the new military states were feudal or semifeudal
monarchies, they had to be ruled by monarchs who were, in principle,
impersonal. Only a supreme and impersonal state could guarantee not
merely independence from the papal Church but continuing stability in the
face of the new ideological threats produced by the division of Christendom into two antagonistic camps.12 This simultaneous centralization and
impersonalization of political power distinguished the European states
from such non-European sovereign bodies as the Ottoman or Ming
empires.
The independence of the new states reinforced by this form of power
created a far greater fragmentation of the continentpolitically, religiously, economically, and ultimately culturallythan had been the case.
The persistent localism that had characterized the European world in
the Middle Ages at a nonelite level was now buttressed by a political ideology endorsed by all but a few. Since the days of the Emperor Augustuss
new Rome, there has been a vision of a future in which Europe would
acquire some kind of unity. Paradoxically, one of the most distinctive political features of the continentthe modern stateresulted in what was,
and in certain respects still remains, the main obstacle to its unification.
12

See Quentin Skinner, The State, in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson,
eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 90131.

10

A NTHONY P AGDEN
THE LEGACY OF EMPIRE

The formation of the European state accompanied the creation of Europes

modern overseas empires. In the Middle Ages, as William Jordan reminds
us, although persistent localism was the condition of most Europeans,
this did not entirely cut them off from the recognition that they were also
part of a wider world. Internationalism was a necessary consequence
of the increased contact between the states of Europe as they struggled
to establish themselves as states, and of the ever-increasing encounter of
Europeans with the worlds beyond Europe. From the sixteenth century
until the first decades of the twentieth, European overseas expansion and
European imperialism were broadly conceived in terms of the triumph,
not merely of one ethnic group over another, but of one political system,
belief, and (crucially) one vision of the world over all others. Europeans
managed to establish some measure of political ascendancy in nearly every
part of the globe in this period. In 1800 the European imperial powers
occupied or controlled some 35 percent of the surface of the planet, by
1878 they had taken 67 percent, and by 1914 more than 84 percent.13 This
astonishing success may be attributedas Michael Herzfeld (chapter 7),
Luisa Passerini (chapter 9), and I (chapter 1) point outto the conviction
that understanding the world and shaping it to meet Europeans ends were
related projects. Most Europeans conceived of themselves as individualists, even if, until the twentieth century, they lacked the language in
which to do so. As Michael Herzfeld reminds us, individualism also was
a concept exported by Europeans to their settler populations overseas
in particular to the British colonists in North America. Europeans were
property owners, not as members of a group, but as persons. Their individualism was, in Herzfelds words, grounded in the relationship between
property ownership and selfhood. A belief in the ability to own discrete
parts of the globe is by no means restricted to Europe. But it is doubtful
that many other peoples have made it so central to their understanding
of what humanity is.
Therefore, the history of the European and subsequent Western domination of the planet is not merely the consequence of a superior technology. It is also the triumph of a conception of the world, one which assumed that the European scientific tradition from Aristotle to Newton had
correctly interpreted the globe as a place for the forceful expropriation of
human potential. Philosophy thus became associated with science in ways
13

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Macmillan, 1987),
1489.

Introduction

11

that were unique or so, at least, it seemed. That it was the Europeans who
had seen this most clearly meant that it was the Europeans who had, in
a quite specific sense, inherited the earth. Others might know how to live
on it, but only Europe possessed the Faustian power to reconstruct it
in its own image. This, too, has become a regulative idea, and it, too,
is founded on very shaky empirical and historical foundations. Before the
first decade or so of the nineteenth century, the European powers had very
little superiority either intellectually or technologically over the peoples of
Asia, even when measured by their own criteria.14 Yet the association of
science with philosophyor, to put it more crudely, with reasonhas contributed more than any other conception to bringing Europe together as a
unity, in the words of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.15
This, too, has a history, as I try to explain in chapter 1. It is a history that
acquires its most compelling and enduring modern form in the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, in a project that linked the quest for individual
autonomy and secularization with the most sustained bid to understand,
and through science to control, the external world of nature. At one level
the Enlightenment project can be read as another extension of the universalist ambitions of the ancient world. Just as the Romans had exported
a concept of civilization and the Christians a concept of Christianity
(as the belief not only in the redemptive power of Christ but also the way
of life to be lived by St. Pauls homo renatus), so the secular thinkers of
the Enlightenment and their heirs exported an idea of humanity as individual, transformative, and property-owningan idea that inevitably
involved a large measure of concern for the burdens of history. In the link
between philosophy and science, reaching out to othersalbeit with
the ambition to transform them into ourselveshas been as much a part
of the European colonial inheritance as the exploitation and enslavement
of others.
This has created a double imposition for most modern European states:
the need to repudiate their imperial past while clinging resolutely to the
belief that there can be no alternative to the essentially European liberal democratic state. Any attempt at something different is either (like
Marxism) doomed to economic failure or (like the various forms of religious fundamentalism) ultimately tyrannical. Talal Asad (chapter 10) is
14
15

See, in particular, Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Diversity of Europe: Inheritance and Future [Die Vielfalt
Europas, Erbe und Zukunft] in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Education, Poetry and History:
Applied Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (New York: State of
New York Press, 1992), 224. See also Luisa Passerinis chapter in this volume.

12

A NTHONY P AGDEN

surely right in saying that Europes colonial past is not merely an epoch
of overseas power that is now decisively over. It is the beginning of an irreversible global transformation that remains an intrinsic part of European
experience and is part of the reason that Europe has become what it is today. His relative pessimism about the possibility of Muslims finding any
place for themselves within European societies that claim to be pluralist
(and at many levels clearly are) is not unfounded. A true European Union,
that is, may need not only compelling cultural symbols and representative
political forms in order to persuade the Danes and the British that what
they are being asked to identify with is as much their Europe as it is the
Europe of the French or the Germans; it also may need sufficient adaptability to provide a common patria for Algerians and Malays, Muslims
and Hindus.
Jacques Derrida has argued, a propos of this aspect of the European
Unions future, that there can be no cultural identity that is identical
with itself, for it is in the nature of a culture that it is not identical with
itself.16 Pluralism, the successor to Kants cosmopolitanism, is aimed precisely at making cultures not identical with themselves in this way. But
the difficulty still remains. Even Derridas formulationperhaps, most
especially Derridas formulationbelongs to a European conception of
the self sustained ultimately by an intrinsically European set of political
values. Any claim that constitutional equality necessarily implies a form
of difference blindness cannot be other than a reflection of the values
of one particular, and in this case hegemonic, culture.17
That pluralism, like most other generalized conceptions, is the product of a specifically European intellectual environment must be especially
obvious to Muslims, who now constitute the largest single immigrant
group in Europe. As William Jordan makes clear in chapter 3, modern
pluralismhowever secularized the conception might be in most Enlightenment thinkersdepends, as does any idea of the unity of European
culture, upon a continuing Christian tradition. Add to this the fact that
from the tenth century until the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in
the nineteenth, Islam had been Europes most constant other, in terms of
religion, and politically and culturally, as the expression of various kinds
of oriental despotism, it is easy to see how a European Muslim might
appear to be virtually an oxymoron. As Asad says in his chapter, in the
contemporary European suspicion of Turkey, Christian history, enshrined
16
17

Jacques Derrida, LAutre Cap (Paris: Les Editions

de Minuit, 1991), 1617. See also the
rather different interpretation offered by Luisa Passerini in her chapter.
See Tullys chapter in this volume.

Introduction

13

in the tradition of international law, is being reinvoked in secular language

as the foundation of an ancient identity.
WAR AND COMMERCE

Europes first modern overseas empires came into being at the moment
when a series of predominantly civil wars had divided it along confessional lines. From the beginning of the Wars of Religion in France in
1562 until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the whole continent was engaged in almost ceaseless conflict. The Treaty of Westphalia
of 1648 achieved an albeit precarious balance of power between the various national states of Europe. It established that religion would henceforth be not a papal but a national issue, and it put a final end to the
Churchs role as arbiter in international affairs. It also set up a division, which has survived to this day, between an increasingly wealthy
Protestant North and an increasingly impoverished Catholic South. Before the reformation, as Henri de Saint-Simon lamented, at a time (1815)
when the Congress of Vienna was seeking to create a new equilibrium
among the European powers, Europe shared a common culture and a
common set of institutions; after Westphalia it became two huge federations permanently at odds with one another.18 One of the objectives
of the projects to unify Europe that emerged in the post-Napoleonic
era was to undo the deleterious effect of Westphalia while preserving
the peace that a Europe of Treaties had been able to achieve, if only
precariously.
The confessional wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
the first modern conflicts in which the belligerents were dividedif not
always consistentlyalong broadly ideological lines. They were also the
first wars to be fought, as were all subsequent European conflicts, both
within and beyond Europe. The Dutch struggle for independence from
Spainthe Eighty Years War, as the Dutch called itinvolved at one time
or another most of the major European powers, and it was conducted not
only in Europe, but also in the Americas and in Asia. As the historian
Charles Boxer has said, it was the first world war, and it ensured that
all subsequent rivalries between the European states would be played out
in a global arena. As Talal Asad (chapter 10) nicely remarks, although in
18

Henri de Saint-Simon, De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne ou de la necessite et

des moyens de rassembler les peuples de leurope en un seul corps politique en conservant
a chacun son independence nationale [October 1814], in Oeuvres de Claude-Henri de
Saint-Simon (Slatkine Reprints [of the Paris edition of 1868], Geneva 1977), 1:1612.

14

A NTHONY P AGDEN

another context, Europe did not simply expand overseas; it made itself
through that expansion.
The Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the confessional sources of conflict between the European powers and in a sense ensured the triumph of
the secular state in the international arena. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713,
however, achieved (in J. G. A. Pococks words) a Europe that had outgrown barbarism, fanaticism, and conquest and in its place established
a republic or confederation of states held together by treaties to which
wars were merely auxiliary, and by a common system of civilized manner
communicated everywhere by commerce. Until 1945 at least, Europeans
may have been one of the most consistently belligerent groups of peoples
anywhere in the world. But, as with many of the general aspects of modern European history, the opposite was true as well: a perennial quest for
an ideal of eternal universal peace, based upon what the Leiden philosopher Franco Burgersdijk in the sixteenth century called an Imperium
Oecumenicuman ecumenical empire.
The desire for world peace was, of course, nothing new. It had been one
of the major objectives of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists,
of Erasmus and Juan Lus Vives. But before the seventeenth century it had
never been pursued with quite such insistence and with such possibilities of
ultimate success, or so it seemed to contemporaries. This desire for world
peace resulted in a series of ambitious projects: the Duc de Sullys Grand
Design of 1620, Emeric Cruces Le Nouveau Cynee of 1623, the Abbe
de St. Pierres Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe of 1712,
and Immanuel Kants Perpetual Peace of 1795. None of these projects,
except Kants, which as I have said was always a condition of future time,
were understood, even by their authors, as serious political objectives. As
Voltaire complained of the Abbe de St. Pierres Projet, it could no more
exist among princes than it could among elephants and rhinoceroses,
or between wolves and dogs. But like Kants ius cosmopoliticum, they
were regulative ideas, ideas that kept the conception of a possible peace
among nations alive during periods of seemingly interminable warfare.
Even the persistent belief that a war between commercial nations could
only ever be, in Diderots telling phrase, a fire that destroys them all19
could not achieve the kind of world desired by champions of the commercial society from Montesquieu to Benjamin Constant. Neither could
the Treaty of Paris of 1763 that brought to an end the Seven Years
19

From one of the passages that Diderot wrote for the Abbe Guillaume Raynals Histoire
philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les
deux Indes, 10 vols. (Geneva, 1781), III, 205.

Introduction

15

Warperhaps the most intense of the struggles between European nations

conducted overseasachieve it, nor the Congress of Vienna, nor even the
Treaty of Versailles. But by the middle of the eighteenth century an order
had been established. This order was based to a high degree upon the
common experience of overseas expansion and of maritime commerce.
For all the cultural and political differences that separated North from
South, it still seemed possible that Europe might aspire to some common
heritage, some common sense of self. This is what Edmund Burke meant
by the great vicinage of Europe.20 As J. G. A. Pocock explains here, it
was also why Burke looked upon the French Revolution with such horror.
The ideological aspirations of the revolutionaries seemed intent to destroy
the polite world of eighteenth-century commerce and to replace it with
scarcely modernized versions of the fanatical convictions that had torn
Europe apart in the sixteenth century.
Eighteenth-century commerce, the commercial society, seemed to
many to be not merely a means of ending warfare within Europe, but also
a device for transforming the older European empires into more benign
forms of human association. By the 1780s, Britain had already fought
and lost one colonial war, and Spain was rushing headlong into another.
The European capacity for overseas domination, once conceived as such a
significant component of her identity, was now increasingly looked upon
as a curse. Despite the confidence in the intellectual achievements that
made it possible, empire itself had never been regarded as an unconditional blessing. The great Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century,
Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, first raised the question of
the legitimacy and the moral consequences of limitless expansion. Ever
since then there had existed a powerful argument that overseas conquests
were inevitably as destructive for the imperialists as they obviously were
for their victims.21 In the second half of the eighteenth century, this moral
unease intensified, both because of the obvious threat created by the everpresent rivalry between the imperial powers and because of the growing
awareness that in a modern society, bound together by what the Marquis
de Mirabeau called the universal confraternity of trade, nothing that
20

21

Edmund Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, ed. R. B. McDowell, in Paul Langford,
ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 9:250. On Burkes invocation in this context of the Roman law of vicinity, see
Jennifer M. Welsh, Edmund Burke and the Commonwealth of Europe: The Cultural
Bases of International Order, in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann, eds., Classical Theories
of International Relations (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 17392.
See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and
France, c. 1500c. 1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 15677.

16

A NTHONY P AGDEN

took place overseas could fail to have some influencegenerally malign

on what occurred in Europe.22
This moral anxiety found its best-known and certainly its most powerful expression in Kant. James Tully (chapter 15) argues that although
Kant roundly denies that European imperialism is in any sense right,
he endorses the general conviction that it moves in the direction of nature and history and the precondition of an eventual just national and
world order. For Kant, however, European imperialism is essentially a
thwarted objective. True, as Tully insists, Kant fully endorses the traditional view of the non-European worlds need for what Tully calls cultural
self-understanding. As Kant said in the Idea for a Universal History
with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, the political constitution of our continent . . . will probably legislate eventually for all the other continents.
But it is also clear that Kants cosmopolitan ideal could come about only
once the habits displayed by the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states . . . in visiting foreign countries and peoples
(which in their case is the same as conquering them) had been finally
abandoned.23 The vision of a cosmopolitan order was, of course, no less
essentially European than the first European empires had been, but it
would at least be one that recognized the rights of all peoples, Europeans
and non-Europeans alike, to determine their own ends as autonomous
human agents. Although Kant nowhere says this, the vision would extend to everyone access to that Faustian power for so long believed to
be a defining feature of Europe alone.
Kantian cosmopolitanism had its origins in an ambition to transmute,
to transvaluate, the older European imperial ambitions. Yet it also,
although in ways that Kant himself could only have deplored, became
the inspiration behind the quest for a new kind of domination. In this
Tully and Asad have good reason to be suspicious of the possible consequences of the so-called Enlightenment project. Kant had looked toward
revolutionary France to provide the political model for the new Europe,
which, as he saw it in the 1790s, could only be republican and federal.
The Marquis de Condorcet had looked in the same direction, even as that
revolution was about to put an end to his life. Like the final stage of Kants
Cosmopolitan History, the Tenth period of Condorcets Esquisse dun
22
23

Marquis de Mirabeau, LAmi des hommes, ou traite de la population (The Hague, 1758),
3:1767.
The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 158. See also Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in Kant Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1067.

Introduction

17

tableau historique des progr`es de lesprit humain is a vision of a republican

order that would eliminate all further conflict within Europe and all military domination beyond. Similarly, Napoleon, although he abandoned
republicanism as a constitutional form of government, retained the view
that his administration, wise and liberal, would bring the same degree
of peace and civilization to the continent as the realization of Kants ius
cosmopoliticum was intended to bring to the entire world.24 Like Kant,
Napoleon saw his empire as a modern version of the confederacies of
ancient Greece, and his imperial venture remained, in Fontanas words
(chapter 5), inextricably bound to the revolutionary heritage and with it
the universalizing tradition of the Enlightenment. Napoleons conception
of a universal European order was, of course, one that was to be united
under a single national sovereign. In this respect, at least, it had much
in common with the subsequent attempts of the German Romantics

Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Adam Muller,

even fitfully Madame de
Staelto revive the idea of the old Germanic Reich as the instrument of
European unification. But just as few Europeans who were not French
wished to see themselves incorporated into the Napoleonic empire, so
few who were not Goths were eager to see a European federalism, in

Mullers
words, wearing German colours.25
Napoleonic and Proto-Germanic imperialism were not, however, the
only discourses of unity offered. Nationalism, which became the single
most powerful language in the postrevolutionary world (and has remained
so until this day), could also be harnessed to the older belief in the civilizing and unifying power of commerce. In nineteenth-century Europe, in
the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, a new pluralism arose. It was based
less on the kind of annihilation of the historical memory that the French
Revolution has supposedly effected and which Ernest Renan believed necessary for the new nationalism, than on a reworking of the Enlightenment
vision of a cosmopolitan order sustained by commerce.26
Benjamin Constant gave the most powerful expression to this new pluralism. In Constants view, as Biancamaria Fontana explains (and Edmund
Burke had understood), the revolutionaries, and their ideologues from
Rousseau to Saint Just, had attempted to destroy the very real freedom
that eighteenth-century commercial society had achieved. In its place they
24
25
26

See Biancamaria Fontanas chapter in this volume.

Adam Muller,
Die Elemente der Staatskunst (WienLeipzig: Wiener lierarische anstalt,
1922), 269.
Ernest Renan, Loubli et je dirais meme, lerreur historique sont un facteur essentiel de
la creation dune nation, in Quest-ce quune nation? (Paris, 1882).

18

A NTHONY P AGDEN

had installed the fiction of a society based upon virtue and a common
will. They had sought to replace a sense of the nation as a patria (as, in
Constants words, a vivid attachment to the interests, the way of life,
the customs of some locality) with a factitious passion for an abstract
being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination and
speak to the memory.27 Constants vision was of an identity based upon
loyalty to a common place, where the ties were ones of friendship and kin,
and of a shared way of life, rather than the empty abstraction that the Revolution had created. Beyond that men should be true only to their moral
objectives. This vision was by no means consistent. But Constants larger
ambition was always, in Fontanas words, for a Europe of commerce and
freedomwhere money fled from the constraints of national frontiers,
and individuals refused to fight for a cause they did not understand or left
their country in search of a better lifestyle or more liberal government.28
Like Montesquieu before them (and to some degree Kant), the postrevolution liberals in France hoped that commerce would do what conquest had tried and failed to do: bring homogeneity out of diversity yet
without destroying diversity itself. Like Montesquieu, they stressed the
variety of the peoples, cultures, and traditions that existed side by side in
Europe.29 The same was true of the Italians Giuseppe Mazzini and Carlo
Cattaneo, the Greek Rhigas Velestinlis (as Ariane Chebel dAppollonia
explains in chapter 8), and the Albanian Teofan Noli. This was to be a
nationalism based not upon exclusion, but upon a community of cooperative states with strong national identities.
The possibility, at least, of a union with a difference has remained
one of the main objectives of all subsequent pan-European projects. If
the excesses of the Jacobins ruptured the earlier Enlightenment ambitions for a cosmopolitan world ruled by the interests of commerce, the
two world wars performed a similar operation on the post-Napoleonic
liberal vision of a community of peaceful, commerce-oriented European
nations united against despotism.30 When the European Economic Community was created in 1958, it also sought to establish peace, and a security against Europes all-too-obvious tendencies toward illiberal politics, through a commercial union. Europe, wrote Altiero Spinelli in 1947,
27

28
29
30

In addition to Fontanas chapter in this volume, see Fontana, The Shaping of Modern
Liberty: Commerce and Civilisation in the Writings of Benjamin Constant, Annales
Benjamin Constant 5 (1985): 215.
See Fontanas chapter in this volume.
See Fontanas chapter; see also Montesquieu, De lEsprit des Lois, Bk. VI, chap. 1.
See Fontanas chapter in this volume.

Introduction

19

had been the pre-eminent centre of the diffusion of civility throughout

the world. It had achieved this position, however, in spite of the fact
that throughout its history it had itself been subjected to almost ceaseless
internecine conflicts. A peaceful federalized Europe would therefore
constitute the greatest possible step towards world peace which can be
achieved in the present circumstances.31
Not only had the Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars threatened
to destroy forever the world of free commercial states. They had also
made possible another kind of imperialism overseas, one that lacked all
the ecumenical ambitions that Constant and others had had for a future
postimperial Europe. The great empires of the nineteenth centurythe
British, the French, the Dutch, the Germanalthough outwardly possessed of many of the trappings of neoclassical universalism that had
marked the first European settlements in America, were as much the
creations of a new nationalism as Napoleons European empire had been.
Unlike most of their early-modern predecessors, however, these new overseas ventures evolved out of former commercial enterprises. The Dutch,
the British, and to a lesser degree the French East India Companies had
all begun as limited seaborne organizations occupying factories that
were overwhelmingly multinational and that operated in areas where the
Europeans were one group of foreign merchants among many. The ambitions of the British East Indian Company, for instance, had their origins
in the same commercial distrust of colonization that Edmund Burke and
Adam Smith had voiced about the British Empire in America. Gradually,
however, these modest settlements were transformed into colonies; in the
British and Dutch cases, they came finally to constitute the basis for a new
imperial project.32 When in 1858 the British Crown imposed direct rule
over India, this represented precisely the seizure of power by a centralized bureaucratic state from a group of largely independent aristocratic
republicans. In the attempt to safeguard their privileges, the directors of
the East India Company even resorted to the language of country-party
opposition that the American revolutionaries had used seventy years before. After the 1880s the new European nations began another period of
fierce overseas competition that would only be resolved finallyand one
hopes irrevocablyby the two world wars. Since the early seventeenth
31
32

Altiero Spinelli, Gli Stati Uniti dEuropa, in Sergio Pistone, ed., Una Strategia per gli
Stati Uniti dEuropa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 41.
K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East-India Company,
16601760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); and P. J. Marshall, Trade
and Conquest: Studies in the Rise of British Dominance (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993).

20

A NTHONY P AGDEN

century, imperial successes provided the European peoples with a sense

of their own collective identity as creators and technologists. Those very
successes have also provided the most powerful reason for competition
between them.
A MODERN EUROPEAN IDENTITY

Europeans, therefore, have more than a shared past; they have a shared
history of antagonisms to overcome. The present attempt to fabricate a
modern European identity must be able to obliterate not only the now
remote struggles for control of Europe or for empire overseas, but also
the more immediate experience of two world wars, in particular of World
War II. For the exiled members of the German Social Democrats and
the Christian Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as for countless other liberals across Europe at that time, Europes other was Nazi
Germany.33 Now, for the first time, western Europeans are confronted
by a need to create for themselves a new postwar political culture. It now
matters what being European is and is not.
The European Union, and any future federalized United States of
Europe (should such a thing come to be), cannot survive unless, as Ariane
Chebel dAppollonia (chapter 8) argues, it can generate some level of
attachment to itself as a new political project. More than a vision of a
just political and social order, in Risse and Engelmann-Martins words,
is needed. What is required is a vision of a political and social order that
is more just and economically, culturally, intellectually, and aesthetically
more compelling than the order currently prevailing in any of the independent nation-states. Peoples, in short, do not willingly surrender their
cultural and normative allegiances to their nation or their political system
in order to exchange it for one that is neither better nor worse. They do
so only in the hope of a brighter future. As Philip Ruttley explains in
chapter 11 on the juridical development of the Union, the original EEC
treaty, the Merger Treaty of 1965, made this plain in stressing the intention
of the Community to promote a harmonious and balanced development
of economic activities with a view to raising the standard of living and
the quality of life.
To say that people are likely to endorse the conception of a new Europe
only if that can provide an improved quality of life is not to conflate
33

See Risse and Engelmann-Martins chapter as well as Tony Judt, The Past is Another
Country: Myth and Memory in Post-war Europe, Daedalus 121 (1992): 4.

Introduction

21

(in Friedrich Meineckes old but still serviceable distinction) the Staatsnation with the Kulturnation.34 One of the basic tenets of European nationalism was (and in many places still is) that the boundaries of the state
must correspond to those of the nation (Talal Asads words). Nationbuilding, particularly in the postcolonial world, has been conceived as
striving to make culture and polity congruent, to endow a culture with its
own political roof, and not more than one roof at that.35 But it is not necessarily so. Shocked by the Terror and faced with the prospect of nascent
German nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Goethe urged
upon his countrymen the salutary image of a culture of many voices
with many political centres in place of a single nation-state. This vision was

reiterated by the novelist Gunter

Grass when, after 1989, he found himself
confronted with the spectre of another quest for a unified German state.
And what applies so markedly to Germany, applies for the other nations of
Europe. Today we are learning to live in a world in which the nation-state,
although still robust, may not be the final stage in some long historical
experiment. It may turn out to be only one political agency among many.
If the European Union is to work at all, Europeans will have to accept
that it is perfectly possible to be, say, French or Spanish while being ruled
from Brussels or Strasbourg by multinational institutions. In a sense the
only secure defense against the dangers of nationalism is to ensure in this
way that the cultural-state and the nation-state are kept separate.
I therefore disagree with the general principle behind James Tullys
claim in chapter 15 that the equal recognition and respect of their
cultural identities require different institutions of self-government. By
their, Tully refers to the position of the remaining Aboriginal peoples
of the worldprecisely the victims of European imperialism. Unlike the
Europeans who are without their consent being asked to share only political soverignty, the Aboriginal peoples have been deprived of sovereignty
of any kind, and under alien legal systems that they did not understand.
Self-determination for them is clearly an unquestionable right. (It is perhaps less clear, however, that the language in which that right is pressed
should be, once again, that of European nationalism merely because the
rights of the peoples in Asia and Africa who have succeeded in gaining
self-determination were also made in that language.)
34

35

Friedrich Meinecke, Weltburgertum

und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des
deutschen Nationalstaates (Munich-Berlin: Druck un Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1915),
12457.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
1983), 43.

22

A NTHONY P AGDEN

Within Europe any claim to an indissoluble communality between

state and culture can be nothing other than an impediment to the political union, the plurality in unitye pluribus unumthat is as much
the objective of the new Europe as it was in the eighteenth century of
the new America. Furthermore, within postwar Europe, as within Kants
ideal confederation, all the states have more or less the same type of government. Certainly all are committed to the principles of liberal democracy. (What will happen in this respect when the Union expands toward the Eastas it must surely dois still an open question.) As Saint
Simon saw at the time of the Congress of Vienna, a unity something
like the one that he believed to have existed in Europe before the Reformation could be recreated only if it replaced the force of religious belief by the politics of liberalism, and the institutions of the Church by
those of parliamentary democracy.36 So long as our political institutions
are roughly comparable, we have no need to invest those institutions
with the features of our culture, nor do we need to insist that all of
us who share a common culturean increasingly difficult position for
any modern Europe state to maintainshould be ruled only by our
people.
Euroskeptics who claim that the legislative and political activities of the
Union are a threat to local cultural difference take a rigidly undifferentiated and highly impoverished view of what a culture is. French culture is
more than a dedication to unpasteurized cheeses, and Britishor more
accurately Englishculture is more than the desire to ride in doubledecker buses. And can any peoples cultural identity be seriously compromised by the disappearance of so recent a creation as the deutschemark?
Of course, as Thomas Risse and Daniela Engelmann-Martin argue
(chapter 13), the dedication to the mark is a dedication to the prime
symbol of German resurgence after World War II. The Deutsche Mark,
however, cannot be described as an integral part of German culture. More
serious might be the British claimalthough it has never been expressed
as suchthat not participating in, for instance, a charter of human rights
was, as integral a part of British culture as an unwritten constitution.
Once again culture is assumed to be static and whole, whereas most cultures are, as James Tully has argued elsewhere so powerfully, constantly
evolving and endlessly porous.37
36
37

Saint-Simon, De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne, 1658.

See James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1115, and his chapter in this book.

Introduction

23

Despite this porousness, despite the learning in the past two decades
of the kind of differences that create antagonism and impede recognition,
some sense of national identity remains a significant part of the lives
of most Europeans. Christine Korsgaards definition of identity as a description under which you value yourself suggests that cultures possess
the same capacity for autonomous self-reflection as citizenship is supposed to possess.38 But it is hard to see how this can be case. Belonging
to a culture, having an identity of any kind, necessitates limiting choice
in ways that can only be partly voluntary. In all cultural exchanges there
is always more than one actor. I do not choose my culture or even have it
thrust upon me. I choose it, or I accept it, in the presence of a third party,
in the gaze of someone. This is the point of Rousseau and Kants roughly
similar accounts of the origins of all society. It is our desire for recognition
by all those whom, in Kants words, we cannot bear, yet cannot bear
to leave, which first drove our ancestors to form societies and which
continues to constitute our place within them.39 A similar difficulty arises
with Tullys hope that a citizen or a people will be the bearer of more
than one culture, of multiple cultural identities (chapter 15). To have a
cultural identity in the first place is to pledge allegiance to the power of
cultural imposition. A citizen who could literally elect to be, say, German
or Portuguese, or who could choose to be some mixture of Portuguese
and German, would first have to have some position from which he or
she could make such a choice. She would have to be a cosmopolitan in the
most literal sense. And having been that, it is hard to see why such a person
would wish to become either Portuguese or German. It is equally difficult to see by what route she would realize that choice. Of course, many
peopleinternational monetary agents and merchant banks are largely
staffed by themspeak several languages with equal ease and share several cultural features. But that, at least for the purposes of building a new
European identity, is not the same thing as being a bearer of more than
one culture.
To create a genuinely transnational identity, a genuinely European
culture, means blending the features of existing European cultures into
a new whole. To claim, as Agnes Heller has done, that there is not now,
and by implication never can be, a European culturethat there is
Italian and German music, there is Florentine and Venetian painting, but
38
39

Christine Korsgaard quoted by Tully in his chapter.

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Kant Political Writings,
44.

24

A NTHONY P AGDEN

there is no European music and no Europen paintingrequires one to

take a very restricted view of what might count as European.40 Paradoxically seen from within Europe, the differences that separate German
from Italian culture are easy enough to perceive. Viewed from, say, Japan,
those differences will seem less obvious than the similarities. Viewed from
Europe there may be no such thing as a European culture. Viewed from
Japan there clearly is. What the new Europe must generate is a sense of
belonging that retains the Japanese eye-view, a sense of belonging that
can perceive diversity while giving allegiance to that which is shared. Of
course, what is to be shared will have to be rather more developed, rather
more obvious than it is at present. It will have to be capable of inspiring a
similar degree of attachment to Europe as the older nationalism did to
the nation. It will have, that is, to create a sense of belonging that is not
merely imposed from outside. As Ariane Chebel dAppollonia points out
in chapter 8, however, the concern with European issues, even within the
more Europhile of nations, is still low. (One example is the low turnout in
European elections.) For most in todays Europe, Europe has as much
resonance as France or England or Castile would have had for a
sixteenth-century farmer. That need not, however, be a serious impediment to the eventual elaboration of a more compelling image of Europe
than the one that exists at present. Attachment has always been a relative
affair. Most peoples everywhere care more for their locality than they do
for their nation, and more for their nation than they do for any larger and
more abstract notion such as Europe. But that is not to say that identity with Europe is an impossible objective. Nor is it the case, as most
of the critics of Europe have supposed, that alliegiance to Europe
must preclude or over-rule allegiance to, say, Spain or Italy. In certain
highly specific instances, the interests of Europe will take precedence
over those of Athens or Dublin: they do so already, just as there have
always existed conflicts between national and regional interests. To share
sovereignty is not to surrender it.
AGENCIES OF IDENTITY

Constructing from local identities a universal identityand the political

culture required to sustain itinvolves assembling and reordering pieces
of national myths and histories to form new ones. These have to be made
40

Agnes Heller, Europe: An Epilogue? in Brian Nelson, David Roberts, and Walter Veit,
eds., The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity (New York
and London: Berg, 1992), 234.

Introduction

25

up as we go along. As Michael Herzfeld says in chapter 7, selfhood is

deeply invested in claims on emblematic symbols of restricted availability. At present these symbols are barely available for Europe. To ask
an individual, let alone an entire people, to be European is not like
asking an immigrant to the United States to become American. However fluid, volatile, and precarious American national identity might be,
it exists, if only as a vaguely existential notion, prior to the arrival of
the immigrant. Over time she will have a considerable impact upon what
being American involves, but she is not being asked to participate in the
initial process of self-definition. She acquires a flag, an anthem, a rhetoric
of self-presentation, a system of laws and courts, and a political culture.
Although many of those things also exist for Europe, they are, as Chebel
dAppollonia points out, still rudimentary. How many people know the
words of the European national anthem, or even that such a thing exists? Nearly all the symbols of European unity are forced to compete with
the much more familiar national versions. These versions, as Herzfeld
suggests, are all too often conceived as a form of property that leads to
the reification of culture as a national possession. Once made in this
way into a possession, local cultures become very hard to surrender.
Creating a modern European identity has, therefore, little in common
with the processes used by the only other modern peoples who have been
faced with a similar need to create or fabricate an identity for themselves:
the settler and indigenous populations of the former European colonies
in the Americas or the indigenous populations of the former European
colonies in Africa and Asia. Both these groups constructed imagined
communitiesin Benedict Andersons now celebrated termthat were
American, or Argentinean, or Nigerian, or Pakistani out of a bricolage of
cultural symbols and beliefs.41 At the same time they struggled to build
a political order that would both reflect and sustain the aspirations of
their new societies. They had their own narratives of foundation, most of
which were inscribed in histories of liberation from their colonial masters
and embodied in national heroes: Washington, Bolvar, Gandhi, Nehru,
Sukarno, Kenyata, or, from a slightly different perspective, Nasser and
Castro.
Although the new Europe also has its origins in the resolution of
conflict, this conflict has only been internal. There can be, therefore,
no national heroes (close as Jean Monnet comes to being one), no
41

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, rev. ed. (LondonNew York: Verso, 1991).

26

A NTHONY P AGDEN

stirring narratives of independence or origination. (Who could be moved

by the story of the creation of the European Coal and Steel Foundation?)
The history of Europe is the collective history of all its parts. Inventing
the European community involves imagining Europe as a community,
and this, as Herzfeld suggests, depends on all its members recognizing
the similarities they do share. The nineteenth-century French historian
Francois Guizot, in Herzfelds words, got around this difficulty by arguing, in effect, that what made Europeans all alike was their shared capacity for being different. Although thislike the possibility that Europeans
have for situating themselves firmly within some wider worldprovides
for a measure of self-description, it is hardly the basis for a distinctive
culture.
The question remains: who, or what, is to be the agent of the new
self-awareness? Clearlyif we are to maintain the necessary distinction
between Staatsnation and Kulturnationit cannot be the state. But it
cannot be the Church, the family, or the parish either. Cultural values

are, as Jurgen
Habermas has argued, always components of intersubjectively shared traditions, and because of this the revision of the values used to interpret needs and wants cannot be a matter for individuals to handle monologically.42 If, as the European Court of Justice has
ruled, the Union is a Community not only of States but also of peoples and persons equally subject to a common rule of law, then what
must eventually be required is a new mode of citizenship.43 And this can
be achieved only in the course of a dialogue between those involved. As
Thomas Risse and Daniela Engelmann-Martin (chapter 13) and Elie Cohen
(chapter 12) stress, the difficulty in actual practice is that all the attempts
to construct Europe, and with it a notion of European citizenship, have
been the work of eliteselites composed of experts whose work has
generally been conducted behind closed doors.
Philip Ruttley (chapter 11) demonstrates just how much of the process
of integration has been a juridical one. In this, too, the Union is unlike
any previous political creation. Whereas all the former colonial states
were constitutional creations (as is the EU), their constitutions were a
general expression of identity among the people. In the United States the
constitution has acquired sacral status. In some casesgun control, for
instancethis has led to a degree of fetishization that has impeded the
development of the community for which it was written. In parts of Africa
42
43

Habermas quoted by Tully in chapter 15.

The European Court of Justice is quoted by Ruttley in chapter 11. See also Tullys chapter.

Introduction

27

and Asia constitutions written by one ethnic group have been used to
tyrannize another. But nowhere, except in Europe, has the constitution
been the creation of a series of treaties that, by their sheer complexity,
have been made inaccessible to the bulk of the population in whose name
they have been drafted.
In chapter 12 Elie Cohen traces the history, and vicissitudes, of the
Single European Currency, perhaps the most contentious, and potentially
most hazardous, attempt to create a new European social and political
community. Here what Herzfeld calls the capacity of ordinary social actors to recast and reconfigure received orthodoxies is severely restricted.
What the ordinary social actor does (informed or more often misinformed by his or her national press) is to recast the received orthodoxy
as a form of conspiracy. The institutions of the Union, and the increasingly complex languages that sustain them, are beyond the range of most
of the peoples of the various nation-states. Public debate on the question of Europe is lamentably restricted in most European countries and
virtually nonexistent in some such as Britain. This is due not only to public apathy fueled by the habitual secrecy of all state bureaucracies. It is
also due to the complexity, and the unfamiliarity, of much of the current
political structure of the Union. Structurally, at least, the European Parliament bears little resemblance to national parliaments anywhere in the
world. The European Court of Justice is primarily an institution whose
purpose is to adjudicate decisions made by functionaries who are not
subject to democratic accountability. This is because, as Philip Ruttley
explains, they come from bureaucratic cultures in which efficiency is valued over accountability, and because they have no equivalents in any
existing democratic society. The European Court of Justice is far closer
to the U.S. Supreme Court than to any European judicial body. It has
the essentially political power to extend the power of community institutions, most specifically that of the European Parliament, and, staffed
largely by judges with marked federalist sympathies, it has been responsible, in Ruttleys words, for nudging forward the process of European
unification.
If Europe is to become the location of political as well as cultural
allegiance, it will need to be far better understood than it is. It will need, as
Habermas has insisted, the kind of dialogue that exists, if sometimes only
fitfully, within most democratic statesnamely, the dialogue between the
citizens and the institutions of the state and among the citizens themselves.
That this is also an objective shared by most of the builders of Europe is, as
Ruttley argues, evident from the terms of the treaties of Maastricht (1992)

28

A NTHONY P AGDEN

and Amsterdam (1997). These require that all decisions taken within the
Union be made as openly as possible. They call for the advancement
of freedom, security, and justice, and they have committed the Union to
a struggle against discrimination on grounds of sex, race, ethnic origin,
religion, belief, disability, or sexual orientation. The treaties have made,
in Ruttleys word, the ever closer union among the peoples of Europe an
integrative process flowing in only one (federalist) direction. As yet, however, despite these good intentions, the dialogue, when it does occur, tends
to be between the representatives of the member states, rather than
between the rulershowever definedand the peoplehowever
understoodof the Union.
What will finally come about if any wider dialogical situation does
emerge is still uncertain. It must surely be not just another political identity, but a new kind of identity, as nationalism was in the nineteenth
century. Already, in the words of the European Court of Justice, the
European Union constitutes a new legal order within international law.
If the Union is to make that legal order into something with which all those
who live by it can identify, it will have to learn to do without local heroes
and without an historical narrative based upon significant moments of
creation. It will, in short, have to be capable of transforming internationalism and cosmopolitanism from the vague yearnings they currently are into more concrete, more persuasive modes of civil and political
association.
To do that, the peoples of Europe will have to abandon the ancient
concept of sovereignty as, in Hobbess phrase incommunicable and
inseparable.44 They will need to be able to accept that a parliament
composed of representatives of various nationalities does indeed represent
each of those nationalities and is not, as some seem to think, an organ
of a federation run in the interests of a single national group. Parliamentary representation has always been limited and fragmentary, and few
national parliaments have been a source of enduring national awareness,
except perhaps in the imagination of those who live by them. But they
can provide a focus of political concern and political loyalties. Therefore, there is no obvious reason why, as Chebel dAppollonia suggests,
a European Parliament should not come to represent a distinctive
Europeanness shared by Greeks, Germans, and French alike. In order to
do that, however, it would have to be something rather more distinctive
44

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 127.

Introduction

29

than the current European Parliament. Its relative powerlessness with

respect to the European Commission rightly arouses concern about the
degree to which it can be said to represent those who vote for it. As
Ruttley points out, the executive power of the Commission and the judicial activism of the European Court of Justice conflict with the beliefs
of some states, most obviously Britain and Denmark, on the separation
of powers and the noninterventionist nature of the judiciary. Both the
Commission and the European Court of Justice are essentially French
creations. Their ideological origins are to be found in the ambition of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationalists, from Francois Quesnay
to Saint-Simon, for a despotism of the law, for a rational and efficient administration that would ultimately dispense with the messiness,
brutality, and particularism of politics.45 But neither enlightened despotism nor the attractions of Alexander Popes whatevers best administered is best can create a place of loyalty or offer a source of political
identity.
The European Union may evolve into something more than the extension of national administrative structures and nationalist sentiments
to a multinational geographical area. In the process of establishing what
is already a quite new federal structure, Europe may create a new politics, one in which identity expressed in collective terms ceases to be of
much political significance. It is fully possible to conceive of a federalism in
which the citizens can agree on those matters that touch them alldefense,
security, welfare, communications, and so onwith no concern for the
origins of the people who act in their name. The close association between politics and culture, and the assumption that both are determinants
of something called identity, are after all a creation of the postrevolutionary representative state. It is possible to think of politics in the same
context as identity, only if you believe that politicsand politicians
actually represent you. This is frequently taken to mean allowing another
to stand in for you. This, in turn, requires that this person not merely act
in your name and on your behalf but also in some sense resemble you:
speak your language, share your tastes, share the same moral imperatives
or (where this is of concern) the same religious beliefs. But, as Benjamin
Constant argued in his famous essay entitled The Liberty of the Ancients
Compared with that of the Moderns, the evolution of modern societies,
which were largely commercial and generally liberal, made it necessary to
45

See the comments by Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (New York:
Penguin Books, 1996), 115.

30

A NTHONY P AGDEN

distinguish between the private person, the private citizen, and the
public actor.46 Modern liberty was not like the ancient liberty that
Rousseau had imagined and Robespierre and St. Just had tried to make
a reality. That was a liberty in which the citizen was obliged to subsume
hisand it was always hisprivate person into the collective identity
of the state. With hindsight it is obvious that what Constant in 1819 believed the modern states of Europe (and the United States of America) were
on the verge of becoming has still to be realized fully. True, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are no longer any Rousseauian republics
left in Europe. But nationalism, various forms of modern communitarianism, and the resurgence in some places of a new kind of republicanism
as a substitute for the old Marxism still carry with them traces of what
Bernard Williams has called St. Justs illusion.47
It is by no means clear that the European Union has the possibilityor
the collective willto create for itself a new kind of federalism. But by
insisting that persons from various cultural backgrounds can represent
each other, by emptying (as far as possible) most kinds of political discourse of moral or religious referent, and by severing culture from the
nation, the European Union has established principles upon which Constants modern republic could finally be built. J. G. A. Pocock may well
be right in saying that the Union must inevitably transform individuals
from citizens into consumers, and that Europe, the cradle of the state,
may be about to discover what it is like to do without italthough not
perhaps in the way he intends.
Doing without the state may sound sinister to those who have every
reason to be content with belonging to large, powerful, and centralized
political societies. But there are those, and they are by no means culturally insignificant, who have everything to gain from total immersion in a
new European sense of self. As Luisa Passerini (chapter 9) explains, for
feminists such a Rosi Braidotti or Ursula Hirschmann being European
can mean turning the historical contradictions of a European identity
into spaces of critical resistance to hegemonic identities of all kinds.48
What is true at the personal level may be true at the community level
although here the benefits to be gained are far less certain. Attempts at
46

47
48

The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns, a speech delivered to
the Athenee Royale in Paris in 1819, in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed.
Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 30928.
Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers,
19821993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13550.
Quoted in Luisa Passerinis chapter.

Introduction

31

totalitarian centralization in some parts of Europe, primarily Italy and

Spain, have heightened regionalism, a form of nationalism within the
state, which has now spread to other states (France and Britain, for
example), which were once thought to be wholly stable communities.
Most separatist or semiseparatist groups from Scotland to Sicily have seen
in Europe a means of establishing their claims against central governments
now viewed as foreign powers. Catalans and Basques, Lombards and
Piedmontese, can agree to be European more easily than they can agree to
be either Italians or Spanish. Members of both the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties are eager to present themselves as good Europeans, and
to avail themselves, wherever possible, of the institutions of the Union
against those of the parliament in Westminster.
The problem with this, however, is that the Europe imagined by nationalists and proto-nationalists alike does not yet exist, as Andres de Blas
Guerrero explains (chapter 14), and it is highly unlikely that an assembly
of autonomous regions will be in a position to bring it about. As Giuseppe
Mazzini observed in the late nineteenth century of the first movement
toward a consolidated, if not yet united, Europe, the creation of pannational Europe could only be the creation of the nation itself. Instead of
gaining increased self-hood (which, rather than political or economic advancement, is primarily what they seek), the small nations of Europe will
find themselves increasingly marginalized by the larger ones. It is highly
unlikely that Scotch or Catalan will become community languages, any
more than Irish has. If the Union increases toward the East, which it surely
must, this can only disadvantage still further the interests of the small nations, which will find themselves similarly swamped by larger and more
powerful voices.
The European Union, like the EEC, has largely been created by states
in their own image, as Ruttley shows. Politically, the Union is a unique institution. It has the exterior shape of a confederation of states but features
of a nation-state. Like the federal government of the United States, it possesses an international legal personality (as does any state), and it can
enter into diplomatic relations with sovereign states (as can other states).
And as its critics frequently point out, the Union, in many crucial areas, has usurped the independent legislative powers of its member states.
In this respect, as Michael Walzer has pointed out, it differs markedly
from the older European empires, which generally tolerated a variety of
different legal cultures within their midst. Practices that were formerly
tolerated within individual member states will inevitably become unacceptable within the legal order of the Union, with some far-reaching social

32

A NTHONY P AGDEN

consequences.49 The hope, therefore, that a structure whose purpose is

to bring about the end of the nation-state in its present form would be
able to offer Europes smaller nations the kind of antiquated national
identity most of them seek, would seem to be at best a vain one.
None of the essays in this volume pretends to offer a consolidated vision
of the future. Whether one shares the optimism of the federalist or the
scepticism of those who still hope that Europe will remain little more
than an economic expression, one can detect a very gradual transition
from a Europe of competing and frequently hostile nations to a Union
of peoples. (This transition, however, is not as slow as some suppose. It is
doubtful that even Monnet and Spinelli could have hoped for the degree
of integration implied by the Maastricht Treaty.) As Friedrich Nietzsche
had seen more than a century ago, the speed of modern communications,
the rapid dissolution of the artificial boundaries between the peoples of
Europe, could only lead, or so he passionately hoped, to the abolition
of nations. The Europe of Nietzsches Good European may still be a
thing of the future. But the idea of Europe is very much with us now.50
49
50

Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997),
49.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1745.

1
Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent
ANTHONY PAGDEN

The identity of Europe has always been uncertain and imprecise, a

source of pride for some and hatred or contempt for others. Like all identities it is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions. It
is also particularly elusive because continents, far more than nations, tend
to be simply geographical expressions. In recent times, postcolonial times,
collective identitiesat least in the face of oppositionhave become commonplace elsewhere. But before the nineteenth century few would have
said that they were Asian or African, andsomething that the peoples of the United States tend to forgetAmerican has always been
carefully qualified in virtually every language but English. Only Europeans
have persistently described themselves, usually when faced with cultures
they found indescribably alien, to be not merely British or German or
Spanish but also European: we Europeans (nos Europai), as the English
philosopher Francis Bacon said in 1623.1
Because it is collective, there are those who have argued that any such
thing as a European identity is, at best, an illusion. Europe now exists
as an economic, and increasingly political, entity. But this has no wider
cultural or affective meaning. It merely describes the signatory states of
the Maastricht Treaty. Yet if that is all Europe was now, or had ever been,
the Maastricht Treaty would never have come into being. For behind the
limited, practical conditions that have brought together a series of postwar states on the continent of Europe into a loose federation lies a very
long history.
The origins of this history are to be found in a fictional but forever
compelling story, one of abduction, and of a metamorphosis. It is the
1

Francis Bacon quoted in John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
(London: HarperCollins, 1993), 3.

33

34

ANTHONY PAGDEN

story of Europa, daughter of Agenor, king of the city of Tyre on the

coast of Sidon. One fine day she was carried off by Zeus, transformed
into a white bull. Zeus deposited her, and ravished her, on the shore of
the continent that would bear their offspring and her name. This is the
myth. As with all myths, however, there is another more mundane version. It was suggested by the Greek writer Herodotus and later seized
upon by the early Christian theologian Lactantius, eager to debunk and
demystify such unsettling erotic fantasies from the ancient world. In this
version Cretan merchants abduct Europa in a ship shaped like a bull and
take her to be a bride for their king Asterius. Since the Cretans are what
later generations would come to call Europeans, and Europa herself an
Asian woman, her abduction was taken by all Asians to be an affront.
Later the Trojans, also a people of what we now call Asia Minor, seize
a (not wholly unwilling) Helen, wife of Menelaus, in revenge. In turn,
Menelauss brother, Agamemnon, raises an army, crosses the sea, and begins the most celebrated war in European history. The Persians, Herodotus
tells us (and Persians is his shorthand for all the peoples of Asia), found
this tale of abduction puzzling. We in Asia, they say, regarded the rape
of our women not at all, thus establishing an enduring Asian cultural
stereotype, but the Greeks all for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman
mustered a great host, came to Asia and destroyed the power of Priam.
Ever since then we have regarded the Greeks as our enemies.2 What
in myth had been a divine appropriation becomes in mythopoeic history a tale of the hatred between two continents, a hatred that would
burn steadily down the centuries, as the Trojans were succeeded by the
Phoenicians, the Phoenicians by the Ottoman Turks, and the Turks by
Russians.
No myth, however, is as simple as that. Most myths are tales of metamorphoses where everything is not merely not all it seems but is frequently
its very opposite. For fleeing from the ruins of Troy, with his father
Anchises on his back and leading his son Ascanius by his hand, comes
Aeneas, who years later will land on the shores of Latium and found
the city and the state of Rome. It is Rome that will be the true creator
of Europe. But Rome, too, will try to shed its mythopoeic oriental
identity. When Virgil, in the first century CE, came to write the Aeneid
under the emperor Augustus, he told another story that would preserve
the link with Troy while at the same time effacing all traces of Trojan
identity. In the twelfth and final book of the poem, the gods, who have
2

Histories, I, 34.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

35

(as gods do) taken different sides in the struggles between the invading
Trojans and the native Latins, decide to bring the war to an end. Juno,
who has supported the Latins, finally agrees to allow the two peoples to
intermarry and thereby create a new race. But she insists that his new race
will look like the Latins, will dress like the Latins, will speak like the
Latins, and their customstheir moreswill be Latin. All they will preserve of their oriental ancestors will be their gods, for those gods were also
the gods of the Greeks, and the common patrimony of all humankind.3
Europe, which will fashion itself for generations in opposition to Asia,
has always owed to Asia its historical origins.
This sense of double ambiguity survives even the collapse of the political structures of the Graeco-Roman world and the dominance of GraecoRoman origin myths. Christianity was to provide Europe with much of
its subsequent sense of both internal cohesion and its relationship with
the rest of the world, and Christianity began as an Asian religion. Jesus
Christ, who is the way the truth and the life, has long since given the Bill
of Divorce to ingrateful Asia where he was born and of Africa the place
of his flight and refuge, and has become almost wholly European, wrote
Samuel Purchas, the English propagandist for the settlement of America,
in 1625 in an attempt to secure the glory of Christs apostolate, and of
the overseas mission, exclusively for Europe.4 Almost wholly because
not even Purchas could entirely discount the existence of the Greek and
Russian Churches and their failure to submit to the authority of the Papacy
or, as the English fitfully hoped, convert to Protestantism. The fact that the
undeniably Christian adherents of Greek Orthodoxy had for long been
under Ottoman rule, and thus fully absorbed into Asia, remained an additional reminder of the alien origin of Christianity. Greek and Russian
Christianity, as J. G. A Pocock reminds us in this volume, would always be
a threat to any sustained attempt to fabricate a single European identity
with a single origin.
Thus an abducted Asian woman gave Europe her name; a vagrant
Asian exile gave Europe its political and finally it cultural identity; and
an Asian prophet gave Europe its religion. As Hegel was later to observe,
Europe was the centre and end of History, but History had begun in
Asia: characteristically the Orient quarter of the globethe region of
3
4

Aeneid, XII, 80842. I would like to thank Maurizio Bettini for drawing this passage, and
its significance, to my attention.
Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of
the World, in Sea Voyages and Lande-Travells by Englishmen & Others, 5 vols. (London,
1625), I, 45.

36

ANTHONY PAGDEN

origination.5 The course of civilization, like that of empire and the sun
itself, moves inexorably from East to West.
In the beginning, however, the world was divided not into two but
three: Europe, Asia, and Libya, as Africa was generally called (although
as Herodotus, the first to travel well beyond the limits of his own home
and who reveled in the oddities of the behavior of those he found there,
complained, with characteristic Greek misogyny, he could not conceive
why three names, and womens names at that, should have been given
to a tract which is in reality one).6 For most Greeks the difference between what they called Europeby which they frequently if not consistently meant Hellas, the lands around the Aegean Seaand Asia or
Africa would remain, as it had been for Aeschylus, one not only of climate and disposition, but also of race (ethnos). Herodotus, however, had
understood that Europe had no natural frontiers and that, as most
subsequent cosmopolitans came to realize through experience, cultures
are never so incommensurable as their members often like to suppose. If
Europe had come to acquire an identity, it was always one that had
to accommodate the uneasy realization that not only were the origins of
Europe non-European, but that no one could establish with any precision
where Europe stopped and Asia and Africa began.
If this geographical uncertainty meant that the landmass of Europe
could not be said to be at the center of the world, it still could be placed
at the center of some other conceptualization of the environment. For the
Greeks and their Roman heirs, the means of establishing a relationship
between them and the rest of humanity frequently rested upon a complex theory of climate and physical environment. The northern parts of
the world, according to this theory, were inhabited by peoples whose inhospitable climates had made them brave and warlike, but also uncouth,
unthinking, andto use the Latinized term that will become central to all
modes of European self-fashioninguncivilized. Those who lived in
the Souththe Asianswere, by contrast, quick-witted, intelligent, but
also lethargic, slow to act, and ultimately corrupta claim that became
in time another enduring stereotype of the Oriental. Europeans (then
the peoples of the Mediterranean), living as they did midway between
these extremes, are the mean. This conception of Europe, much modified
it is true, but still insistent on the radical distinction between North and
South, retained its imaginative force until at least the nineteenth century.
5
6

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications,
1956), 99101.
Histories, VII, 104.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

37

(The current use of the terms by the United Nations and international aid
agencies to mean, roughly, the developed and the developing worlds
is perhaps unintentionally a continuation of the same distinction.) Even
Hegel, writing in the 1830s from the viewpoint of an intellectually and
culturally emergent North, could still speak confidently of the Mediterranean as the uniting element of three quarters of the globe and the
centre of World-Historyonce, that is, he had relegated America firmly
to the domain of the future, where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the Worlds History shall reveal itself.7 As late as the 1960s, the
great French historian Fernand Braudel was able to refer (with no trace
of irony) to the Mediterranean as the radiant centre of the entire globe,
whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without ones being
able to define the exact boundary between light and shade.8
Europe, wrote the first-century Greek geographer Strabo, in the earliest surviving attempt to demonstrate and explain the continents perception of its superiority over all others, is both varied in form and
admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men
and governments. The two instincts in man (the peaceable, which Strabo
significantly called the agricultural and the civilized, and the warlike)
live in Europe side by side, and the one that is peace-loving is more
numerous and thus keeps control over the whole body.9 In Strabos account the Greek dialectic between the world of nature (physis) and that
of men (nomos, a term that relates to law and custom or as we would say
culture) has been resolved in Europe and only in Europe.
Because of this harmony, Europe becomesin another image that has
survived unbroken to this daythe home of liberty and of true government. The Greeks, Herodotus tells us, are the most free of peoples, because, unlike the Asians, they are subject, not to the will of an individual,
but only to the law. European society might have had many forms of government, some of them decidedly less liberal than others, but centuries
later Voltaire echoed an enduring commonplace when he claimed that
the continent constituted a kind of great republic divided into several
states, all of which were united in having the same principle of public
law and politics, unknown in other parts of the world.10 As Montesquieu
7
8
9
10

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 86.

Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a lepoque de Philippe II,
2d ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 2 vols., I, 168.
Strabo, Geography, 2.5, 26.
Quoted in Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1968), 123.

38

ANTHONY PAGDEN

had remarked some years earlier, most of Europe (he was a little uncertain
about Spain) is ruled by custom (les moeurs); Asia, and the still darker
regions of Africa and America, by despots.11
The rule of law, restraint through custom rather than will, was responsible for the fashioning of societies that provided a space for individual human action, while at the same time ensuring that such action
was rarely capable of reducing society to a state of simple anarchy. From
this we will see the descent of the notion that all human improvement depends upon conflict, that human beings are, by their nature, competitive
creatures, and that only those societies that know how to harness what
Kant in the late eighteenth century called mans unsocial sociability
instead of attempting to suppress it will flourish.12 As Machiavelli noted,
the power of the Roman Republic had derived from the opposition between the Senate and the plebians and not from the exercise of a common will, as so many had supposed.13 There was from the beginning
the conviction, which the modern democratic societies of the West have
inherited, that this vision of the world was in the longif not always
in the shortrun suitable for all peoples everywhere and that its cultural power was irresistible. This assumption could have emerged only
within a collection of societies, which, while being in many significant
respects very different from one another, shared the sense of a common
identity.
How the highly chauvinist Greeks could speak of themselves as members of a larger grouping of peoples, which must have included non-Greek
speakers and thus, in the Greek understanding of the term, barbarians,
is probably impossible to determine. The Greeks, however, had always
been peoples on the move (poluplanes)extreme travellers. Some time
in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus traveled to Egypt and Libya, to Babylon
and the Phoenician city of Tyre, even to southern Russia, and reported
extensively on what he had found there. Phythagoras, the great sixthcentury mathematician, journeyed from his native Samos to Egypt and
Crete before settling finally in Croton in southern Italy, and the earliest
of the ancient geographers, Hecateus of Miletus, visited Egypt even before Herodotus had. By the third century, the rhetorician Isocrates could
11
12
13

De lesprit des lois, VIII, 8, Oeuvres compl`etes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris:
Gallimard, 1951), 2 vols., II, 356.
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant:
Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 445.
See Quentin Skinner, Machiavellis Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizo Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12141.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

39

confidently declare that being a Hellene was no longer a matter of blood

or racial origin, but one of culture and education.14
This sense of a possible communion with all the peoples of the inhabited world (oikoumene) may have been due, as Strabo suggests, to the fact
that Europe could provide for itself all the fruits that are best and that
are necessary for life and all the useful metals and imported only luxury
goods, species and precious stones that he says dismissively make the
life of persons who have a scarcity of them fully as happy as those who
have them in abundance.15 Only Europe as a continent, crisscrossed
by trade routes from East to West, could do this, but none of the many
disparate peoples of the Mediterranean could do it alone. Life was so
difficult for those peoples that they could survive only by developing the
great commercial networks that would become the basis of their future
expansion far beyond the limits of Europe. Because of the intense competition that persisted among them, they were all forced into the political
unions called the symmachiai and sympoliteiai that dominated the later
world of the Greek city-states, until at the battle of Chaeronea in August
338, Philip of Macedon swept it away altogether. This combination of
strength and dependency made the recognition of a shared political culture difficult to withhold. The cities of Ancient Greece, wrote Edward
Gibbon of the origins or modern Europe,
were cast in the happy mixture of union and interdependence which is repeated
on a larger scale, but in a looser form, by the nations of modern Europe; the union
of religion, language, and manners which renders them spectators and judges of
each others merits; the independence of government and interests, which asserts
their separate freedoms, and excites them to strive for pre-eminence in the career
of glory.16

This political culture was centered upon a unique form of life: the city.
Of course, as in most other civilizations, the vast majority of the populations of Europe actually lived and worked in the countryside until well
into the nineteenth century. For most of the rural peoples of Europe, and
the illiterate majority in the cities themselves, identity was a question of
attachment to microcommunities: the parish, the village, the guild, sometimes the country, the pays (or what the Castilians aptly called the patria
14
15
16

Francois Hartogth, Memoires dUlysse: Recits sur la fronti`ere en Gr`ece ancienne (Paris:
Gallimard, 1996), 1213.
Strabo, Geography, 2.5, 26.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David
Wormersley (London: Penguin Books, 1995), I, 106.

40

ANTHONY PAGDEN

chica, the small homeland), only rarely the nation, and never, one suspects, such an abstract cultural grouping as Europe. But for the literate, intellectual elites who had far more in common with similar groups
from other nations than they did with their own peasantry, the spaces
beyond the city walls were, until they became sentimentalized in the mideighteenth century, largely invisible. What Voltaire mockingly called the
supposed savages of America were in his view indistinguishable from
those savages one met every day in the countryside, living in huts with
their mates and a few animals ceaselessly exposed to all the intemperance
of the seasons.17
Despite its dependence upon agriculture, despite the real distribution
of its populations, Europe, as a collection of social and political groups
with a shared and historically-determined culture, was conceived as overwhelmingly urban. Our entire political and social vocabulary derives from
this fact. Politics and polity have their root in the Greek term polis.
Similarly, civil, civility, and civilization have their origins in the
Latin word civitas, which describes the same spatial, political, and cultural entity. Both polis and civitas became, in time, abstract nouns, sometimes translatable as the state or the commonwealth, and definable
in abstract terms. But originally they belonged to a semantic field that
described the urban space itself, and a close association between urban
ways of life and true civility persists to this day. Cities were, of course,
by no means unique to Europe. Like all else that defines European culture,
the walled, largely self-governing urban space had originated in Asia.
With the rise of Athens after the sixth century, an association in the
European political imaginaire began to form between an urban environment and a particular way of life. Man, said Aristotle, was zoon
politikonquite literally an animal made for life in the polis. True,
he was not the only such animal. Bears and ants were observed to be
similarly sociable. But hisand in the Greek world it was always his
way of being in the world was for him not merely the best attainable
existence. It was what the Greeks called the good life, the only life in
which it was possible for man to achieve his ends as a man, to achieve
that elusive goal that Aristotle termed eudaimonia, his Latin, Christian
translators, blessedness, and later writers rendered as happiness, or
by the clumsy term employed by many modern philosophers, human
flourishing.
17

Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et lesprit des nations, ed. R. Pomeau (Paris: Classiques
Garnier, 1990), 2 vols., I, 23.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

41

Furthermore, true politeiai were like the persons who inhabited them,
autonomous entities. They were places of autarkeia, or self-sufficiency,
self-governing, autonomous; they were what in the Latin Aristotelian tradition came to be called perfect communities. This is also the moral
force behind Strabos claim that Europe was, unlike Asia, self-sufficient
in foodstuffs since the ability to provide for ones own material needs suggests a high degree of personal autonomy. Little wonder that for Aristotle
there could be no life beyond the limits of the city but that of beasts and
Gods.18 Because humans, unlike both beasts and Gods, were guided by
rules, by laws and customs, the city was also the source of law. Those who
lived within it had to abide by its rules. Beyond was the wilderness, what
later writers would describe as the state of nature. All humans began
in this condition, and all humans are constantly threatened by it. In the
Greek worldview, and in the conceptions of generations of Europeans,
to live in the state of nature, to live like a barbarian or a savage,
meant living as something less than human. The polis was, in this way,
a bounded space. But it was also conceived as a community that could
even transform all those who entered it. Aristotleto whom we owe much
of what we now know about the place of the polis in Greek life, although
he celebrated the city of Athens and wrote her political historywas an
outsider by birth.
This identification of a distinctive European communal life with a specific environment reached its peak with the effective domination of the
whole of what we now call Europe, and much of Asia, by the greatest
city of them all: Rome. Like the Greek cities to which it was heir, Rome
was the source of law, the place of custom, mores, which in the poet
Virgils punning vision was now encircled and protected by its massive
walls (moenia).19 Unlike the Greek city-states, Rome (particularly after
the collapse of the Republic) depended heavily for its political identity and
continuing survival on the vast areas of Europe and Asia over which it exercised authority. Thus, to a far greater degree than its Greek antecedents,
it welcomed outsiders within its walls, andat least during the periods
when this particular civic community offered stability, security, and the
access to world powerit proved to be enormously attractive. It might
be said, wrote James Wilson as he reflected upon the possible future
of the United States as a new Rome in the West, not that the Romans
18
19

Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 129.

Bellum ingens geret Italia, populosque feroces
contundet moresque viris et moenia ponet
Aeneid 1, 2634.

42

ANTHONY PAGDEN

extended themselves over the whole globe, but that the inhabitants of the
globe poured themselves upon the Romans.20
It is, therefore, unsurprising that by the first century CE, this Roman
Empire, which was merely an extension in space of the city of Rome, the
poet Horaces Prince among Cities (princeps urbium), had come to be
identified simply with the world, the orbis terrarum.21 After the establishment of the Emperor Augustuss new regime in 27 BCE, these imperial longings became formally expansionist to the point where Rome was
transformedimaginatively at leastinto a world-state, bounded in
Virgils words only by Oceanus.22 This did not mean that the Romans
ignored the actual existence of the rest of the globe, nor that they ever
seriously aspired to full domination over it. Indeed, they possessed a lively
and sophisticated ethnographical curiosity about the peoples who inhabited the lands beyond the frontiers of the empire. It meant that, for the
Romans, the peoples of these other worlds, the Syrians, for instance, or
the Chinese, had no separate identity as communitiesmuch less as political powersas the Romans conceived such things. When, in the second
century, the Emperor Antonius Pius was addressed as Lord of all the
World (dominus totius orbis), this merely gave legal expression to longheld Roman belief that, whether those who lived beyond their borders
recognized it or not, the political realm of Rome and the human genus
had been made one.23
Rome, however, was not only a political realm. It was also the embodiment of the Stoic belief in the possibility of a single law for all humanity. If
the Greeks gave Europe the philosophy and the mathematics that made
possible its subsequent scientific development, the Romans gave it its legislative habits. Although the concept of Europeans as law-governed peoples originated in Greece, it was the Romans who elevated the law to
the place it still holds todayas the sole guarantor of the continuity of
civilization, however we choose to define that emotive term. Much of
this was swept away during the Gothic invasions that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the outer fringes of the empire, Germanic
customary law came to replace Roman law. But despite these changes,
that law remained, and remains, the single most unifying feature of the
20

21
23

Lectures on Law: XI Citizens and Aliens, published in 17901, can be found in

The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1967), 2 vols., II, 581.
22 Virgil, Aeneid, 1, 2867.
Horace, Odes, IV.3, 13.
Digest XIV, 2.9. See Claude Nicolet, LInventaire du monde: Geographie et politique aux
origines de lempire romain (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 28.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

43

continent. Edmund Burke, good European that he was, offered an image

of a world of independent states united as a common culture, based upon
the old Gothic customary [law]. . . digested into system and disciplined
by the Roman law, in every part of which it would be possible for a
European to feel at home.24 For this reason the creation of a single legislative order for the whole of Europe remained an ambition of the most
powerful of Europes rulers from the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, through Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV to Napoleon. In somewhat
muted form, this ambition is held by the European Court of Justice today.
After the triumph of Christianity, ancient Greek and Roman notions of exclusivity were further enforced by Christians insistence upon the uniqueness both of the Gospels and of the Church as a source of moral and
scientific authority. Custom, in Lactantiuss words, had been made congruent with religion. Christianity was thought of as spatially coextensive
with the Roman Empire. The world, the orbis terrarum, thus became, in
terms of the translation effected by Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century,
the orbis Christianus or, as it would be called in the European vernaculars, Christendom. As late as 1761, such a relatively hostile witness
as Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceded that Europe, even now, is indebted
more to Christianity than to any other influence for the union . . . which
survives among her members.25 It was a union he frequently abhorred
but from which he could never quite escape.
The scattered, diverse, and plural cultures of the ancient world that
constitute what we now call Europe shared, therefore, a single identity as
so many places of human flourishing bound together by a common system of law. When they gradually converted to Christianity, they acquired a
common religion and a common cult. They also shared a language: Latin.
Although, after the fourth century, Roman institutions, Roman architecture, and Roman literature gradually lost their power to unite Europe in
a common culture, and the concept of a single body of citizens vanished
altogether, Latin survived as the language of the Church and the learned
elites of Europe until well into the eighteenth century. As the Italian
Republican Carlo Cattaneo noted in 1835, Europe possessed four unifying
24

25

Edmund Burke, Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament on the
Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France [hereafter, Letters on the
Regicide Peace], in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford et al.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19811991), IX, 2489.

Ecrits
sur labbe de Saint Pierre, in Oeuvres compl`etes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed.
Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Biblioth`eque de la Pleiade, 1964),
III, 566.

44

ANTHONY PAGDEN

features: the power of the former imperial authority, the Roman Law,
Christianity, and the Latin language.26
Latin, however, was almost wholly a written language, and even then it
was largely confined to the clergy and the lay intelligentsia. Few could, or
did, actually speak it. Even the professoriat, who were bound by statute in
most of the universities of early-modern Europe to deliver their lectures in
Latin, spoke for the most part in a curious hybrid version of the language
and when excited frequently lapsed for long periods into the vernacular.
Diplomatic Latin became restricted after the 1520s to polite formulae,
and writers on the increasingly important science of diplomacy, such as
Ottaviano Maggi, stressed the need for living languagesalthough in his
De Legato of 1566 he did so in Latin. Most of educated Europe before
the eighteenth century was multilingual. Rulers, such as the Holy Roman
Emperors, governed peoples speaking a bewildering number of languages.
Charles V was said to have spoken Spanish to God, French to his mistress,
and German to his horse. Many European languagesBreton, Provencal,
Arrogance, Walloon, Piedmonteseare now minority tongues that have
long been made subservient to a national vernacular. But throughout most
of the early-modern period, these were the dominant and in some cases
the official languages of the regions in which they were spoken. Making
oneself understood as one passed from one territory to another was of
crucial importance.
Since few could hope to speak all the major languages of Europe, most
educated Europeans shared the conviction that there should exist a spoken
tongue that, if not as universal as Latin had once been, should be widely
understood. In the sixteenth century this became Italian, the language in
which Dante, two centuries before had, in a self-conscious break with
tradition, decided to write his great poem. Italian was the language of
literature and as such as familiar to the learned elite as English is today.
Michael de Montaigne learned Italian, although his father had brought
him up in an entirely Latin-speaking household, and when he crossed the
Alps, he changed the language of his journal from French to Italian. On
returning through the Mon Cernis pass, he noted, in French, here French
is spoken, so I leave this foreign language in which I feel competent but
ill-grounded.27 By the late seventeenth century, because of Louis XIVs
effective political domination of mainland Europe, French had become
the language of diplomacy and the courts, and the language in which
26
27

Carlo Cattaneo, Sulle Interdizioni israelitiche, ed. G. A. Belloni (Rome: Sestante, 1944),
568.
Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 162.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

45

educated Germans, such as Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote when they

were not still writing in Latin or, in Leibnizs case struggling to devise a
universal system of characters capable of expressing all our thoughts
be we Frenchmen or Assyrians.28 And French remained dominant until
the end of the eighteenth century.
Despite the religious, cultural, and linguistic unity they had given to the
continent, neither the Roman Empire, nor Christendom was, of course,
identical with Europe. Much of the Roman Empire lay in Asia and
in North Africa. Christianity had begun as an Asian religion, and the
first Christian churches had been established on the North African littoral. After the fall of Rome, however, and the subsequent attempt under
Charlemagne to rebuild the empire in the West, the notion of the world
shrank until it covered little more than what is today continental Europe.
Charlemagne,althoughfrequently claimingsomekind of world sovereignty,
called himself pater europaethe father of the Europeans. The Emperor
Charles V, who in the early sixteenth century came closer than any ruler
before or since to uniting Europe under one sovereign, was addressed as
totius europae dominuslord of all European obvious allusion to
Antoninus Piuss claim to be dominus totius orbis.
For all this self-confidence, however, Europe was, and always had
been, a highly unstable term. No one has ever been certain quite where
its frontiers lie. Only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean provide obvious
natural boundaries. For the Greeks, Europe had sometimes been only
the area in which the Greeks lived, a vaguely defined region that shaded
into what was once Yugoslavia in the North and is still Turkey in the
South. For most, however, Europe had a larger, more indeterminate geographical significance. It was seen as the lands in the West, whose outer
limits, the point at which they met the all-encircling Okeanos, were still
unknown. Beyond Europe lay Asia and Africa. Africa, South of the Atlas
mountains, was dark and unimaginable and remained so, despite the
Portuguese exploration and settlement of large areas of the western shores,
until the nineteenth century. Only the North coast, which had once been
part of the Roman Empire and from the fifteenth century was the home
of Barbary pirates and the focus of disastrous crusading ambitions by the
Portuguese and the Spaniards, was terra cognita. North Africa, however,
was a frontier region where Berber states and Ottoman client rulers posed
a constant threat to the settled places of Christendom until the extinction
28

Leibniz, quoted in Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 100.

46

ANTHONY PAGDEN

of Turkish hegemony in the Mediterranean in the late seventeenth century.

All along the southern coast of Italy and Spain were strings of fortifications to guard local populations against the continual threat of Islamic
incursions. These might be brief, but they could also be deadly. When in
1544 Francis I of France allowed the Turkish fleet to winter at Toulon, he
was not merely giving assistance to the enemies of Christ (and, more to
the point, of the Emperor Charles V). He was dissolving a centuries-old
antagonism. He was allowing Asia into Europe.
If Europes southern frontiers were in this way indeterminate, her eastern ones were forever undecided. Poised between eastern Europe and the
recognizable Orient was the unsettling presence of Russia. Russia, sometimes friend, more frequently foe, threw into stark relief the fact that
Europe was a culture, a shared way of life, rather than a place. Russia
had many of the features of a European society, and it was undeniably
Christian. Yet because of its vast size and the fact that so much of it had
been ruled for so long by nomadic peoples who were clearly not European,
it lay beyond the formal limits of Romanized civilization. While it remained, in this way, stubbornly an oriental despotism, Russia rested firmly
within Asia, the backward barbaric empire of the steppes. But once, in
the eighteenth century, its rulers took to wearing silk brocade and conversing in French, it became inescapably Europeanized. In their ambition
to subjugate Europe, the Russians, Rousseau declared, had themselves
been subjugated. Peter the Great, the first of the Czars to modernize,
which meant Europeanize, the Russian Empire, was described by
Montesquieu as having given the manners of Europe to a European
power.29 His successor, the Empress Catherine the Great, declared at the
beginning of the reforming constitutional code she had devised (the Nakaz)
that Russia is a European Power.30 (Catherine, however, was German
born and French educated and Russian only by marriage.) But if the
Russia of Peter and Catherine was in, as far as the rest of Europe was
concerned, it was only partially so. Frederick the Great of Prussia was
not alone in denying the empire of the Czars any lasting place among
what he described significantly as the civilized nations of Europe.31
When seen in this way from the heartlands of Europe, Russia could appear distinctly other. When set, however, against the image of the true
29
30

31

Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, XIX, 14.

Denis Diderot, Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies
for the Making of the Laws, in Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason
and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85.
Quoted in Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 2d ed. (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1968), 125.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

47

Orient, she appeared, if only fleetingly, European. When William Pitt,

during the Ochakov crisis of 1791, proposed sending British troops to
help the Sultan resist the Czar, Edmund Burke responded angrily: What
have these worse than savages to do with the powers of Europe, but
to spread war, devastation and pestilence among them? Russia, if only
briefly, had thus joined the powers of Europe.32
Because of this ambivalence, which survives to this day, the official
frontier to the East, always a faintly absurd notion, was forever on the
move. At the end of the fifteenth century it advanced steadily from the
Don, where it had been fixed for a thousand years, to the banks of
the Volga; by the late sixteenth century it had reached the Ob; by the
nineteenth, the Ural and the Ural mountains. In the twentieth it finally
came to rest on the banks of the river Emba and the Kerch.33 Despite
this juggling with geography and the literalness with which geographers
from Fra Mauro in the 1450s to the All-Union Geographical Society in the
1950s have treated what is, in fact, a cultural frontier, despite Catherines
efforts and the absorption in the nineteenth century of the Romanovs into
the families of the crowned-heads of Europe, Russia has always been incorporated into Europe imperfectly. After the creation of the Soviet Union,
that tenuous sense of similarity vanished once again, and communism
rapidly became for many Europeans, in particular those close to the Soviet
borders, yet another manifestation of the Oriental other. Today things
are beginning to change, if only gradually. East-German politicians, such
as Lothar De Maizi`ere, conceive of a common European house that will
supersede the old divisions so that a greater Europe from the Atlantic
to the Urals [will] again takes shape.34 But the Germans feel a special
responsibility toward the rest of East Central Europe. Europeans from
farther West remain diffident and suspicious. Eastern Europes uncomfortable proximity to Asia and its linguistic and religious separateness (made
the most striking in the Russian case by the use of the Cyrillic alphabet)
reinforce the belief that the East belongs on the far side of some unmarked
but clearly perceptible frontier.
If European society was, and remains, one broadly committed to a life
of civility, it is also one in which identity has been closely associated
32

33
34

Quoted in Jennifer Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the Crusade against the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan,
1995), 78.
See W. H. Parker, Europe: How Far? in The Geographical Journal 126 (1960): 27897.
De Maizi`ere quoted by Risse and Engelmann-Martin in chapter 13.

48

ANTHONY PAGDEN

with ownership. Citizenship in Europe has long been restricted to property owners. (Until very recently jury service in Britainthe obligation
of the citizen to participate in the judiciary processwas restricted to
house owners.) Even the French Revolution could be conceived by some,
Tocqueville and Taine among others, as the product rather than the source
of modern property relations.35 The right to property could be established
in a number of ways: by autochthony, by inheritance, by purchase, or by
what in Roman law was called prescriptionthat is, prolonged and unchallenged possession. But the question for most early-modern theorists
was how to establish property rights as a feature not only of the civil law,
but also of the law of nature. One of the basic claims of the latter was that
all humankind had been granted an equal share in the earth. Inequality
was a feature of the divisions of the races of the world into different peoples and thereafter of the creation of political societies. How then had the
first men acquired the right to divide up Gods earth among themselves?
The answer to this question, which still plays a significant role in the
European definitions of land rights, drew on the Greek conception of the
potentiality of nature.
In a celebrated passage in the Second Treatise on Government, John
Locke argued that mankind had acquired possession of the earth by laying out something upon it that was his own, his labour. So that he
thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another
had not Title, nor could without injury take from him.36 It was thus
mans labourprecisely, that is, his techne (skills)that established
his right to secure for his personal use alone a portion of what was significantly called Adams plenty. In Emeric de Vattels Le Droit des gens,
ou principes de la loi naturelle appliques a` la conduite et aux affaires des
nations et des souverains of 1758, which became a textbook on the natural
law in the late eighteenth century, the disposition to acquire property in
this way is turned into a definition of what it is to be humanthe imposition, in Hegels understanding, of the subjective will on the objective
world of nature. The cultivation of the soil, wrote Vattel,
is an obligation imposed upon man by nature [emphasis added]. Every nation
is therefore bound by natural law to cultivate the land which has fallen to its
share. . . . Those peoples such as the Ancient Germans and certain modern Tartars
who, though dwelling in fertile countries, disdain the cultivation of the soil and
35
36

Donald R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1984), 126.
Lockes Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 309.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

49

prefer to live by plunder, fail in their duty to themselves, injuring their neighbours
and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey.37

As Talal Asad observes in this volume, European history becomes a

history of continuously productive actions defining as well as defined by
Law.
Men were thus encouraged to see in the natural world a design of which
they were the final beneficiaries. Art itself, as the eighteenth-century
Scottish social theorist Adam Ferguson was later to observe, is natural
to man. . . . [H]e is destined from the first age of his being to invent and to
contrive.38 But not precisely all men. The European sense of superiority,
of having been singled out, first by nature, then by God, to play a special
role in the history of creation, derived from the conviction that only those
who dwelt in the kind of law-governed free urban communities of which
Europe was constituted would ever be likely to possess the capacity to
harness nature to their purposes. The others, the barbarians, ground
down by the demands of their rulers and thwarted in every attempt to
express their individual selves, remained forever in unenlightened herds.
In Europe the arts were, in the full sense of the term, liberal. And if these,
too, had begun in Asia, in Babylon and Egypt, it was only in Europe that
their potential had been realized. The liberal arts, wrote a complacent
Samuel Purchas, are more liberal to us, having long since forsaken their
seminaries in Asia and Africa.39
It is this, too, which led to the assumption that science would always be
superior to simple force. In Herodotuss view it had been their skills, their
techne, which had allowed the vastly outnumbered Spartans to defeat the
Persians.40 Generations of later Christian apologists represented the Turks
as an enslaved, archetypical Asian, people, descendants of the Scythians,
who had been denied not merely freedom of action by their rulers, but
also all access to knowledge.41 Their military success, like those of the
Persians before them, had been due in part to their ferocity and in part
to the weakness and intellectual poverty of their opponents. Throughout the sixteenth century, when successive Christian intellectuals called
37

38
39
40
41

a` la conduite et aux
Le Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle appliques
affaires des nations et des souverains [1758], ed. James Brown Scott (Washington:
Carnegie Foundation, 1916), 3 vols., III, 378.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12.
Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, I, 17.
Herodotus, Histories, IX, 61.
See James Hankins, Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of
Mehmed II, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995): 111207.

50

ANTHONY PAGDEN

upon their rulers to bury their differences and mount a crusade against
the Turk, the claim was always that European, Christian, science could
never fail against Asian ignorance. And when, beginning in the thirteenth
century, Europeans set out to persuade the world of the truth of their
religion, they assumed a self-evident association between knowledge and
belief. The European capacity to span an open space using an arch was
said to have instantly persuaded one Peruvian chieftain of the truth of
Christianity. The Jesuits who traveled to China in the late sixteenth century took with them clocks, astrolabes, telescopes, clavichords, Venetian
prisms, and suction pumps. If, the argument went, the European God had
taught the Europeans how to devise such ingenious things, the European
God must be the true one. The Chinese, however, had other conceptions of
the necessary relationship between technology and religious belief. While
grateful for the clocks, they declined the offer of the Gospel. This refusal
to accept the obvious led the most famous of the Jesuits, Matteo Ricci, to
declare that they have no logic and the Chinese to accuse the missionaries of indulging in countless incomprehensible lines of reasoning.42
After Columbuss discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape
of Good Hope (famously declared by Adam Smith to be the two greatest
and most important events recorded in the history of mankind),43 the
European belief in the capacity of European science to dominate the world
became even more assertive. Both these oceanic journeys had been made
possible by the use of the compass and the skill of European navigators and
cartographers. Only those whom Purchas described as we in the West
had been able to achieve such triumphs. Asians and Africans had been
capable of limited navigational feats. But only the Europeans had managed to cross oceans, to settle and to colonize. Only the Europeans had
civilized peoples from distant and inferior worlds. In a famous engraving by Johannes Stradanus of 1589, Amerigo Vespucci is shown drawing
aside a curtain to reveal the America whom he will have named, and
thus in some sense created. In this image of the first moment of contact,
Vespucci is represented with an astrolabe, the symbol of his empowering knowledge in his hand. America, in recumbent allusion to Vespuccis
own image of the continent as an ever-available female, is raising herself
half-naked from the long sleep of her ignorance.
42
43

Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2423.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976),
2 vols., II, 626.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

51

From the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century images of the
four continents appeared in the most unlikely places. They were reminders
both of the newly acquired vision of a vastly enlarged world and of
Europes triumph over so much of it, a triumph that only the sciences and
the arts had made possible. Take one striking but representative example. On the ceiling of the stairway hall of the Trappenhaus, the residence
of the Prince-Bishops of Wurzburg, a princely family in no way associated with transoceanic navigation, the great eighteenth-century Venetian
artist Giambattista Tiepolo depicted in lavish detail each of the four continents. They are so arranged that no matter where the viewer stands,
Asia, Africa, and America can only be seen in relation to Europe. The
allegorical figure of Asia is shown seated on an elephant, Africa on a
camel, and America on a crocodilemenacing, languid, and amphibious.
Only Europe sits on a throne instead of an animal, and only Europe is
surrounded, not by the natural produce of the continent she represents,
but by what its peoples have created, by the attributes of the arts, of music
and painting, the sciences, and the technology of warfare. Furthermore,
Europe is the point from which all the other figures must be viewed. As
Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall wrote, to look at Europe one
should look from Europe for Asia, Africa and America are depicted in
their relation to Europe. Europe is the rubric, the initial code.44 This is
why in Cesare Ripas Iconologia of 1603, a work that provided artists with
a easy set of iconographic rules, readers were instructed to depict
Europe wearing a crown to show that Europe has always been the
leader and queen of the whole.45 Thus an abducted Asian princess had

become, as she appears in Sebastian Munsters

Cosmographia of 1588, a
Queen.
The shrinking of the frontiers in this way gradually forced upon the
European consciousness a greater sense of the boundaries that lay between them and the rest of the world. But this did not, except for the
very few, result in any greater sense that the assumed superiority of the
continent over all others might be unwarranted. Montaignes skepticism
which drew some of its inspiration from his awareness of non-European
cultures as well as from the diversity of cultural practices within Europe
led to a form of cultural pluralism. In the hands of the natural law theorists of the seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf in
44
45

Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Imagination
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 154.
` vitij, Afetti; Passione humane, Corpi
Iconologia overo Decrittione dimagini delle virtu,
celesti, Mondo e sue parti (Padua, 1611), 356.

52

ANTHONY PAGDEN

particular, the awareness of the diversity of the world beyond Europe did
much to shatter the idea that that law of nature was more or less identical
with the customs practiced by the peoples of Europe. Even the information that was available by the end of the seventeenth century on such
an advanced and complex civilization as China did little to shake the
belief that, taken as a whole, European civilization was not doing very
much better than any of the available alternatives. To believe otherwise
is to mistake the force of Montaignes irony for approval. Similarly, the
uses to which Voltaire put the Chinese sacred historieswhich seemed
to demonstrate that there were centuries that the biblical narrative of the
creation could not account forwere largely directed against the absurd
claims of the Christian Church rather than at the broader cultural worlds
that have always sustained it.
What Burke called the great vicinage of Europe might no longer be
the source of natures laws, but for most Europeans it remained the only
place of true civility, of free men living in secure urban communities under
the rule of law. The rest of humanity served out its days under tyrannies
governed according to the caprice of individual rulers, or in nomadic
or seminomadic groups never far from the primordial state of nature.
By the late seventeenth century this sense of exceptionality had found
expression in a stadial theory of history. In this universal narrative all human societies begin as hunter-gatherers. They then become pastoralists,
less mobile than their predecessors but still, as Montesquieu phrased it,
unable to unite.46 Finally, they invent agriculture, and this in time transforms them into city dwellers and traders, into modern, civilized, social
beings. For all the great social theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centurieswhich in this volume James Tully subjects to such searching
criticismthe final stage (commercial society) represented the highest
possible human attainment on a trajectory through which all the peoples
on the globe were bound to pass. The commercial society was one that
had forsaken ancient violence (or so it was hoped) for benevolent, enlightened communication, for the transaction not only of goods but also of
beliefs, habits, and ideas. The commercial society was one, or so its proponents believed, that could finally dispense with colonization in favor
of harmonious transnational cooperation, one in which the less civilized
peoples of the world would welcome the civilizersnot as conquerors
and despoilers but as intellectual and moral liberators. The peoples of
America, Africa, Asia, and other distant countries seem to be waiting
46

Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, XVIII, 11, Oeuvres Compl`etes de Montesquieu, II, 537.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

53

only to be civilized and to receive from us the means to be so, and find
brothers among the Europeans to become their friends and disciples,
enthused the Marquis de Condorcet in 1793, at the very moment that the
order he was celebrating was about to vanish.47
The ability, whether the consequence of environment or divine will,
to control the resources of the natural world, to make them work for
the greater good of humankind, had given Europe its assumed superiority
among the peoples of the world. This is the origin of the belief, which is still
shared by many, that Europe or The West or The North is somehow
exceptional. As much as we all may regret it, for long periods of its recent
history, the West has exercised technological and political mastery over
much of the rest of the world. Just as the ability to do this derived substantially from a specific set of convictions embedded in particular ways
of lifefrom a specific cultureso the record of those achievements has
served to define that culture.
Europeans are, I suspect, unusual in sharing in this way a sense that it
might be possible to belong to something larger than the family, the tribe,
the community, or the nation yet smaller and more culturally specific than
humanity. If the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, or the Singhalese
now sometimes choose to identify themselves as Asians, this is because
European notions of ethnicity, and the domination of the world economy
by European concepts of exchange, have compelled them to do so. Similarly, the peoples of, say, Uganda and Congothemselves the products of
European impositionsare highly conscious of belonging to a continent
called Africa largely because European colonization, and the marks of
European racism, have obliged them, for motives of economic and political survival, to speak of Africa, from Libya to the Transvaal, as if it were
the bearer of a common cultural identity. Yet being African in Africa or
Asian in Asia provides only the loosest cultural or political cohesion and
at most levels no cohesion at all.
I am not endorsing any kind of European exceptionalism. All the peoples of the world are the outcome of the combination, dispersal, and recombination, through warfare and the pursuit of subsistence, of myriad
diverse groups of peoples. China, which is larger than Europe, was not inhabited by one ethnic group either. Nor was Assyria, Elam, Urartu, Persia,
ancient Mexico, or Inka Peru. But these were ethnic states. They invited
(or compelled) the outsiders whom they conquered into their homelands
47

Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse dun tableau historique des progres de lesprit humain,
ed. Alain Pons (Paris, 1988), 269.

54

ANTHONY PAGDEN

and absorbed them into the dominant ethnic community. What is unusual
about Europe is that it has for long possessed an identity as a cultural
space where there have been and continue to be frequent political unions.
It has never, however, constituted a single state, much less a single ethnic
group.
The modern European Union has, in one sense, changed all that. The
notion that Europe might become not merely a loose association of
communities sharing an indeterminate common culture, but instead a political union of states is hardly new. From the Duc de Sullys Grand Design
of 1620 to the fitful projects, which begin to appear after the 1840s, for
a United States of Europe, there has existed a continuous objective to
create a European federation that would finally put an end to intracontinental warfare and enhance the welfare of all the peoples of the region.
Only since 1945, after what the Spanish writer and statesman Salvador
de Madariaga once described as Europes two great civil wars, has this
project had any chance of being realized.48 Despite the single market and
the single currency, despite ever-increasing convergent political and legal
institutions, the vagaries and uncertainties that once hung over the notion of a single European identity hang there still. Europe will never be
an ethnic community, nor even the mega-state that the opponents of the
Union so fear it might become. But the European Union andshould it
ever come aboutthe United States of Europe will surely come closer
than any political order has ever done before to establishing just what it
means to be a European. When it does it will be the embodiment of a
vision that reaches back nearly three millennia.
48

Portrait of Europe [Bosquejo de Europa] (New York: Roy Publishers, 1955), 23.

2
Some Europes in Their History
J. G. A. POCOCK

I shall try to give some answers to the questions What is Europe? or

rather What do we mean by Europe? The second question implies that
Europe is something we have invented, and there is a habit at present
of putting the words the invention of before the name of anything we
want to discuss. This implies that there is nothing to discuss except the
reasons, very likely discreditable, that have led others to invent whatever
it is and impose their construction upon us, so that the point of discussion
is to liberate ourselves from the construction by subverting the dominant
paradigm, as the bumper stickers urge us to do. This is, of course, a
very healthy skepticism, and I intend to adopt it in this essay. I do, in
fact, perceive that a construction called Europe is being invented and
imposed upon me in language that suggests that I must accept it without
asking too many questions about what exactly it is, and I am very skeptical
about the motives with which this is being done. I like to characterize
myself as a Euroskeptic, in the proper sense of the term; meaning that I
am skeptical, indeed, about the use of Euroskeptic to denote that sort of
person. Why is it being suggested that we cannot be a skeptic about Europe
without being a fanatical opponent? When that sort of thing happens, it
is usually because a word is being used so as to block all critical thought
about it, and we may want to ask who is using it in that way and from
what motives.
Equally, I do not want to suggest that there is nothing to study here
except constructions in the mind, framed with discreditable intentions. I
have no difficulty in accepting Europe as a reality as well as a construction; many things in human history can be both at once. When I set foot
in Europe, I know that I am there and not in America or in some other
place; that is, I am in a certain place, a configuration of land and water,
not just the sum of the maps that have been drawn of it, and I am in a
55

56

J. G. A. P OCOCK

certain complex of human cultures and human histories constructed by

human effort of one sort and another. They have been constructed, however, by so many humans doing and meaning so many different things
that the process of construction becomes a kind of reality and cannot just
be reduced to a limited number of constructions and inventions waiting
for us to come and deconstruct them.
I want, then, to describe ways in which the word Europe has been
usednecessarily by people acting in historyand how those ways have
grown and spread until the word has reached the point of being used
to denote, first, a continent and, second, a civilization. I am skeptical
about both these ways of using it. I hold Europe to be only part of a
continent and only part of a civilization, but the word has been used to
denote, and to bring together, a great many things that are important in
human experience, and it is important to see what these have been and
are. In the last analysis I am conscious that as a New Zealander I am not
a European. I am, therefore, looking at Europe from the outside; I am
not committed to it.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONCEPT OF EUROPE

Let us start with some geography. The word suggests land, and human
beings, of course, are land animals. But for some thousands of years they
have been seafaring animals as well, and if, like me, you come from an
island group situated in the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, you know
that the seas are bigger than the continents, and that what we call the
Planet Earth could just as well be called the Planet Water. It should come
as no surprise, then, that the invention of continents was the work of
humans who had left the land and were looking back at it from the sea.
The original distinction took shape in a saltwater area of very limited
size, with land masses all around it. I refer, of course, to the Aegean Sea,
the part of the Mediterranean that today lies between Greece and Turkey.
The ancient peoples who used that sea and lived around it became aware
of what we call the Bosphorus, the narrow waterway that connects the
Aegean with the larger and, to them, less-known Euxine or Black Sea.
They developed myths and folktales that had the effect of giving the name
Europa to lands lying West of the Bosphorus and the name Asia to
lands lying East of it. At the same distant time, a third name, or rather
a pair of names, appeared to denote another coast and its hinterlands
lying well to the South of the Aegean. One of these, Egypt, was the
Greek Aegean term for the peoples of the Nile valley and its delta, an

Some Europes in Their History

57

immensely ancient and literate people who could give their own accounts
of who they were and where they came from. The other word, Africa,
tended to move westward, away from the Egyptians, and adhere to other
coastlandsalso known as Libya, Mauritania, and so onwith which the
Aegean Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact as their ships explored
the Mediterranean basin.
Once we start talking about the movement of words from one coastland
and hinterland to another, we have begun talking about geography and
cartography: the description of configurations of land and water and their
reduction to spoken and written words and image. Over many centuries
perhaps more than twenty from start to finish of the mapping process
the Aegean words Europe, Asia, and Africa moved outward from
the coastlines to which they had originally been applied and traveled
deeper and deeper into the hinterlands behind them until finally they
reached the opposite seacoasts of these hinterlands and became the names
of what were by then called continents. There is a process in the history of
geography by which the word continent comes to denote a landmass of
very great size, possessing a well-defined maritime perimeter, and linked to
other continents either by a single narrow isthmusas Africa is joined to
Asia and the two Americas to one anotheror not at all, as in the cases
of Australia and Antarctica, the two island continents in the southern
hemisphere.
The anomaly in our typology of continentsan anomaly that shows
how Aegean and Mediterranean concepts still dominate our thinking
consists in our persistent habit of listing Europe as one of the seven continents, when it does not comply with the above definition at all precisely.
There is a disjunction between the ancient and medieval practice of distinguishing the parts into which the earth was divided and the modern
postnavigational practice of mapping and listing the continents. The
continent of Europe is a product of the Mediterranean need of a term
to describe the lands West of the Bosphorus. It is also the product of the
exceptionally self-centered and world-dominating outlook developed by
a civilization that took place in those lands. The notion of a continent
was formed in that civilization but does not fit its own self-description as
the continent of Europe.
In the sixteenth century there were in circulation many copies of a
map and image of Europe, the first part of the earth in the form of a
virgin. It was shaped by the rule of the Habsburg family over Spain, the
Netherlands, the German Empire, and Austria, and showed Europe
as a crowned woman, whose head was the Iberian Peninsula and whose

58

J. G. A. P OCOCK

heart was situated at Prague. Her left arm was the peninsula of Denmark,
and she held a scepter ruling over the Baltic and the North Sea; her right
arm was the peninsula of Italy, with which she grasped the island of Sicily,
as an imperial orb giving power over the Mediterranean. The skirts of her
robe floated freely over vast and indeterminate regions, between the Black
Sea and the Baltic, to which the draftsman affixed such names as Scythia,
Muscovy, and Tartary.
One can see that the mapmakers have been pushing the Baltic as far
East and the Black Sea as far North as they dare, hoping to bring them
close enough to each other to justify the description of Europe as a continent, but it is not possible to link Europe to Asia by a narrow isthmus
with sea on either hand. Europe is not linked to Asia so much as it is
an extension of it, a peninsula or subcontinent like that of India. Even
then there is no huge mountain barrier like that of the Himalaya, separating the peninsula from the rest of the continent that we might call
Eurasia. The skirts of the imperial robe float over an enormous plain in
which there are neither seas nor mountains, nor any natural frontier at
all. Subsequently, there arose the habit of terminating Europe at the Ural
Mountains, which marked no important climactic or cultural or political
characteristics. It is another characteristic of the Habsburg map that it
can touch only the coasts of Scandinavia North of the Baltic, as of Africa
South of the Mediterranean. One might almost say that Scandinavia is a
separate peninsula of the Eurasian continent and that Europe is another.
When Scandinavia came to be considered part of Europe is a historical
question.
The formation of Europe was not quite complete in 1760 when
Voltaire, who though a great historian was not a great scholar, wrote his
History of Russia under Peter the Great. Certainly, he wrote to celebrate
the work of Peter and his successors in bringing Russia into the civilization he thought of as European; but at the same time he is inclined to
include Sweden, Baltic Germany, Poland, and Russia in an area he called
simply the north (le nord) and did not consider fully European. And
what is more, Voltaire remarks that if you situate yourself imaginatively
about the Sea of Azov, just East of the Crimean, you cannot tell where
Europe leaves off and Asia begins. It would probably be better to abandon
both terms, expanding the term le nord into terres boreales or terres arctiques, corresponding (he says) to the terres australes and antarctiques
which we use in speaking of the great continent we believe to exist in
the southern hemisphere. Very soon after Voltaire wrote this, European
navigators in the Pacific dissolved the southern continent into the two
island continents called Australia and Antarctica, perhaps confirming the

Some Europes in Their History

59

presumption that continents must be situated in the ocean. But we have

not given up the practice of describing Europe as a seventh, or rather as
the first, continent, though we have long known perfectly well that its
eastern aspect does not separate it from Asia but establishes a continental
heartland in which all frontiers, physical or cultural, are essentially indeterminate. This tells us a great deal about the civilization that has grown
up in Europe and calls itself by that name, and we have now to turn
from Europe as a continent to Europe as a civilization.
The word Europa was in use in the Roman empire but was not
used self-descriptively; Rome may have known that it was in Europe but
did not characterize itself as European, since the word was not used that
way. The reason for this was that the Roman empire was not continental
but Mediterranean. It was formed by the hegemony of a central Italian
people over all three of the coastlandsAsian, African, and European
first defined in the ancient Mediterranean and has been carried deep into
the hinterlands behind each: in Asia as far as Armenia and Mesopotamia,
in Africa as far as the cataracts of the Nile and the Sahara, and in Europe
by a series of conquests (first over the Iberian peninsula, then beyond the
Western Alps into Gaul and Britain and the delta of the Rhine, and finally
over a series of provinces along the Danube from modern Switzerland to
modern Romania). The poet Ovid found himself exiled to the shore of
the Black Sea, on the edge of Voltaires le nord, which he thought of as
Scythia, not as Asia. In central Germany the Romans were closer than
they knew to the vast indeterminacy of Eurasia.
Now what we call Europe is a civilization, rather peninsular and
transalpine than Mediterranean in any comprehensive sense, created in
the last group of Roman provinces after the disintegration of a unified
Roman empire. That disintegrationGibbons famous Decline and Fall
came about in stages. The first, most European, and to him for various
reasons the most prominent, was the collapse of Roman control over the
far western provinces, and over Italy itself, which happened when an upheaval originating in nomadic central Eurasia caused German peoples to
move over the Danube and Rhine in greater numbers than the Romans
could absorb. This extinction of the empire in the West was Gibbons
primary theme, both because it happened first and because he was preoccupied, as a European, with the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the papal
church. But it was followed, two centuries later, by an even greater event,
when a religious revolution in the Fertile Crescent led to the Muslim Arab
conquest of most of Roman Asia and all of Roman Africa, from Egypt
West to Spain: the destruction of Mediterranean cultural unity, which has
never quite recovered.

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The conquest produced a double separation of Europe from the

other Mediterranean hinterlands: the western provinces went their own
way, and the empire that survived was based in Constantinople, with
one foot in ancient Asia and the other in ancient Europe, one East and
the other West of the Bosphorus, which had originally separated the two.
Four and then eight centuries later still, Islamicized Turks from Central
Eurasia began and ended the conquest of Arab Asia and Egypt, and of
Byzantine Asia and Europe; the princedom of Muscovy set itself up as
the Third Rome, the heir of Byzantium; and this completed a process by
which the concept of Europe migrated irreversibly to the far western
provinces. As a result, we are no longer quite sure whether the former
Byzantine world (ex-Ottoman or ex-Soviet) belongs in Europe or not,
and the great indeterminacy of Europes eastern borderlands has taken
on a cultural as well as a geographic significance.
The geographical concept of Europe has moved West, to the point
where it defines an Atlantic peninsula by calling it a continent. Similarly,
the historical concept of Europe has migrated, to the point where everything we mean when we say the history of Europe refers to the history of
the political and religious culturethe highly distinctive civilizationthat
arose in the far-western Latin-speaking provinces of the former Roman
empire. This has become what we mean by Europe, and its history is
what we mean by the history of Europe. The lands to which the term
Europa was originally appliedThrace, Macedonia, Illyria, the more
modern Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbiathose which the Byzantine emperors considered their European themes or provincesare in our minds
only marginally European, inhabited by uncouth warring tribes whose
history is not ours and whose problems are none of our business.
We are no doubt very wrong in having this perception, but we do have
it, and it is important to understand how we have acquired it. In the western provinces lost by the Romans to a diversity of German-speaking settlers, two things happened. The Christian Church acquired the formidable
organization of papal authority, and the barbaric kingdoms acquired the
formidable feudalism of heavy-armored horsemen. All this happened a
long way from the sophisticated urban societies of the Greeks, Arabs, and
Iranians, but the consequences have been such that the narrative of history was stolen from them. In his book significantly entitled The Making
of Europe, Robert Bartlett has examined how it happened that this farwestern culturefeudal, papal, monastic, Latinbegan in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries to expand aggressively. It expanded westward at the
expense of Celtic peoples, beyond England into Wales and Ireland;

Some Europes in Their History

61

eastward at the expense of Slavic and Finno-Ugrian peoples, beyond

Saxony into the heartlands of the European peninsula; and southeastward at the expense of the Byzantine empire and the increasingly Turkdominated Arab Khalifat, in the far less stable and enduring enterprise of
the Crusades. It was the last expansion that led the Greek historian Anna
Comnena to write that all the western barbarians had marched across
Europe to Asia. She also refers to the mainly Frankish and Norman crusaders as Celts, which tells us that she is using what old Greek and
Latin terms she can find to describe far-western phenomena, and that
there is no reason why she should think of herself as either European
or Asian. She is a Roman. It has not yet happened that the new Latin
civilizationto Anna Comnena purely barbariccan claim a monopoly
of the word Europe and a monopoly of history by calling itself by that
name.
The episode of the Crusades did not last. The expansion of Europe
into the Slavic heartlands altered the historical map by creating what we
think of as the problem of Central Europe. Certain Catholic provinces
of Latin culture were createdamong Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Croatsand they share that European history that is the history of the Latin papacy and empire and their aftermath. These peoples
exist in close proximity with other peoplesRussians, Ukrainians, Serbs,
Greeks, and Turkswhose history is not Latin and whom we may think
of as Europeans or not as we choose. The point is that we have to choose
and do not quite know how to choose.
The eastward expansion of the western Latins entered that broad zone
where there is neither a maritime nor a terrestrial frontier permitting us
to say where Europe leaves off and Asia begins. In this zoneonce
known to geopolitical theorists as the Heartland of the World Island
the Latin civilization that came to call itself Europe found itself without any fixed cultural, ecclesiastical, or political frontiers either. To the
Southeast, the lands originally called Europe passed increasingly from
Greek Orthodox to Turkish Muslim control, culminating in the temporary Ottoman conquest of Catholic-Protestant Hungary in 1526. In the
indefinitely extensible heartlands between the Baltic and the Black Sea,
the contact between Latins and Greeks was overwhelmed in the thirteenth century by Mongol power, which deeply affected the history we
call Russian and left Poland and Lithuania vulnerable to Crimean slaveraiders well into the seventeenth century.
Is all this history European or not? It depends on what we want to
say, and on whether we want to decide what we want to say. History since

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1989 suggests that wewhoever we arewould rather not have to

decide. Is this the product of a prudent awareness that Europe has no
frontiers in the East or of some deeper weakness of will?
THE ENLIGHTENED NARRATIVE

I now return to the history we all know, more or less, and describe as
the history of Europe. When did it begin to be said that Europe
had a history, and when did it begin to be implied that all history was
the history of Europe? A good answerthough like all good answers an
oversimplificationcan be given by fastening on the great historians of the
eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment: on Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume,
Robertson, and the extraordinary partnership of Raynal and Diderot. They
were the ones who set about defining Europe as a secular civilization
and supplying it with a secular history and an age of modernity.
Writing history for them was a weapon against the Church, Protestant
as well as Catholic, and in consequence they wrote a history of the Church
designed to reduce it to secular history. The weakness of the Roman empire, for them, had coincided with the rise of the Church, and there was
a polemic against the history of Greek philosophy, because the Christian
theology that gave the Church authority had been shaped in the old Greek
East, in Alexandria and Antioch and Constantinople. Islam, which the
Enlightened historians rather admired, had progressively destroyed that
Greek world. But in the far western provinces lost to the Franks, Saxons,
and Normans, a new Latin theology had arisen, designed to buttress the
universal jurisdiction of the Pope and to make the Latin church the greatest enemy ever faced by the authority of human society over itself. Gibbon
wrote that the beginnings of modern history should be sought in the eighth
century A.D., when the papacy allied itself with the Frankish kingdom that
became the empire of Charlemagne. Notice that he is using modern to
mean not ancient (and therefore Christian). He has not reached the
point of using it to mean not medieval (and therefore no longer wholly
Christian). For all of these historians there had followed a long struggle
between the empire and the papacy, each created by the other. A climax
occurred about 1300, when the papacy called in the French Angevins
to defeat the Hohenstaufen in Italy, and the French kings defeated Pope
Boniface VIII and removed the papacy from Rome to Avignon. History
as seen by French scholars and publicists now removed its center from
the Church Universal to the kingdom of France, not universal but
hegemonic.

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63

This was a history of feudal as well as clerical power. The Crusades

figured as the ultimate lunacy of both. It was, of course, a wholly Latin
history dominated by an obsession with the Pope. Greek Orthodox history,
which we might want to call European on the grounds that it continued Christian and Roman history in a non-Latin way, was excluded from
it once the Byzantines were driven out of Italy. Gibbon declared that he
could find nothing in Byzantine history except its fall that deserved more
than a summary and that it was better to study the far more dynamic
peoplesLatins and Normans in the West, Arabs and Turks in the East,
Bulgars and Russians in the Northwho had supplanted it. Latin history
contained its own dynamic. Its external enemies remained external, and
even its critical expansions into Spain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Central
Europe remained peripheral to the struggle between church and civil
society, which had happened nowhere else. Here is the germ of the idea
that history happens only in Europe, while other peoples never change.
The Enlightened narrative proceeded to the late fifteenth century, when
Europe could be said to have become modern in the sense of not
medieval. It began emerging from the feudal and clerical, barbaric and
religious, culture that has enveloped it ever since Charlemagne, or since
Constantine. This was partly a result of the recovery of pre-Christian classicial culturefor which, significantly, Europe was supposed to have
been indebted to the fall of Constantinople and the extinction of Byzantine
civilization. But also it was the result of a series of technological innovationsgunpowder, the compass, and the printing pressunknown to
the ancients. We associate these with the discovery of the New World,
but for Voltaire and Hume and Robertson, they had a prior importance
their role in the creation of powerful military monarchies controlling their
own resources, pursuing their own policies, and capable of acting independently of the papal Church. Once there were several of these monarchies, Europe could be said to have endowed itself with a states-system,
whose raison detat and jus gentium took the place of the political theology
of empire and papacy, and this states-system, or system of international
relations, began to become the definition of Europe itself.
The great Edinburgh historian William Robertson wrote of Europe
as an entity that had pre-existed the Romans, been half-destroyed and yet
half-civilized by Roman conquest, flung into barbarism half-redeemed
by religion when the Roman empire collapsed, and a millennium later
emerged into conditions under which a civilized religion could again exist.
All these were events in the history of Europe. Their culmination
occurred, for Robertson, with the empire of Charles V, which seemed to

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threaten Europe with a new universal empire but, in fact, ushered in the
age of reason of state, when the French monarchy, resisting the Habsburg
dynasty, and the English monarchy, adapting itself to this struggle, began
educating Europe in the conduct of secular power. The balance of power
was Europe, and Europe was the balance of power. It was Spanish
and French, English and Burgundian, German within the structure of
the Holy Roman Empire. It was seldom Polish and never really Central
European at all. Its energies were turned inward on the problems of Latin
civilization, and the explosion of that civilization into Mexico and Peru
belonged, said Robertson, in a history that would have to be written
separately.
In 1780, in their great Philosophical and Political History of the Two
Indies, Raynal and Diderot had already begun to write the history of the
Europeans conquest: first, of the planetary ocean, which had brought
them in contact with all the cultures in the world simultaneously, and,
second, of the two American continents, which was leading to the creation of European societies existing beyond Europe. The discovery of
America, said Hume, marked the true beginning of modern history.
Robertson, however, confined his history to the first half of the sixteenth
century and did not continue it through the seventeenth. Unlike Voltaire
and Hume, he chose to avoid the Wars of Religion. The Enlightened mind
saw Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anabaptism as the reverse side of the
medal to the papacy they sought to destroy: religious fanaticism threatening civil authority in a new way. Voltaire and Hume did not see the
Wars of Religion as ending at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; they were
preoccupied with their after-effects, the Wars of the Fronde in France, the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British islands.
These wars carried the story into Voltaires Age of Louis XIV, the first
and most central of his historical writings. Voltaire saw Europe emerging from the last phase of religious fanaticism into an age of Enlightened
sociability fostered by both courtly monarchy and commercial refinement.
A peripheral debate was carried on by those who held that Louis XIV
had threatened Europe with another universal empire like that of the
Romans. In their view the states-system constituting Europe was achieved
only when his adversaries brought him to terms (or he them) at the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. French and Scottish historians could agree that
Utrecht had achieved a Europe that had outgrown barbarism, fanaticism, and conquest. It was a republic or confederation of states held
together by treaties to which wars were merely auxiliary, and by a common
system of civilized manners communicated everywhere by commerce; a

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65

European economic community, in fact, but one composed of states whose

sovereignty was the precondition of their capacity for commerce.
This was the Europethe civilization of states, commerce, and
mannersthat we so misleadingly call the ancien regime (it was totally
and self-consciously modern) and that Edmund Burke, writing in the
1790s, declared had been destroyed by two disastrously regressive events:
the French Revolution and the partition of Poland. The first occurred at
the very heart of Enlightened Europe. What was disastrous about it
was that it had restored the climate of fanaticism and returned Europe
to its climate during the Wars of Religion, with ideology taking the place
of theology. The second event occurred nearer the periphery, in what we
have been calling Central Europe. To understand its meaning to Burke,
it may help to recall that the great Enlightened histories were mostly
written just before, during, or just after the Seven Years War (the French
and Indian War) of 175663. This war enlarged a European war into
a global struggle and in the process modified the concept of Europe
itself. The system founded on the Treaty of Utrecht was in essence an
Anglo-French Consortium, with Spain, the Netherlands, and Austriandominated Germany and north Italy as auxiliaries. The Seven Years War,
however, transformed this system in two ways. West of the Atlantic, a
struggle for empire in North America and the Caribbean became so farreaching that the historians Raynal and Diderot could propose that wars
for power in Europe were now dominated by wars for oceanic commerce
and empire. They set out to write the first history of the world-system
created by European conquest of the ocean, arguing that Europeans
were still barbarians who had not fully escaped from the Middle Ages
and asking whether even an Enlightened system of global free trade could
improve them. This is the first history that tries to view Europe in its
global setting, but it is still the maritime far-west of the peninsula they
are looking at. France, they declare, is at the center of Europe because
it lies between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They probably mean
that Europe has been defined by France.
East of, let us say, the river Elbe, the other face of the Seven Years
War enlarged the limited warfare of the system founded on Utrecht into
a struggle between three military empires: the Austrian, the Prussian, and
the Russian. The Central European space in which their war went on
merged into the vaster space in which Europe and Asia can no longer
be told apartVoltaires le nord, created by such far-reaching processes as
the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of the Russian
state by Peter the Great and his successors. Voltaires history of Russia,

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J. G. A. P OCOCK

which I quoted earlier, is the major response of Enlightened historiography

to all this. He sees Peter as creating a European state, fit to take part
in the treaties and commerce of Europe. Voltaire even imagines that
contacts between Russia and the Ching emperors will induce China to
take part in this system. He believes that Russia and China between them
will domesticate the Central Asian steppe and end that phase in world
history when Huns or Mongols might dominate or destroy the settled
civilizations around them. This is to imagine Europe as tomorrow the
world. Voltaire is enraged by Rousseaus insistence that Peter did too
much damage to the customs of his subjects, so that sooner or later the
Europeanized Russian state will collapse and the Tartars will return to
Europe. But if the far western imagination did not travel all the way
to China and Kamschatka, it might stop on its own doorstep. Gibbon,
having carried his history to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, could,
in principle, have gone on to the greatness and decline of the Ottoman
Empire and the politics of its Austrian and Russian successors. But there
is no Enlightened history of Central and Eastern Europe, none that offers
to explain the partition of Poland. Gibbon chose instead to return to his
starting point amid the ruins of the Capitol and write three chapters on the
city of Rome under the popes as far as the Renaissance. The imagination
of Catholic-Protestant-Enlightened Europe always came home to its
deeply critical concern with itself.
Enlightened Europethe states-system of the Treaty of Utrechthas
been principally a set of political and cultural arrangements imposed by
the maritime states of the Atlantic coastlands. It was brought to an end
if we follow Burkes analysisby two series of events. The first was the
revolution in the maritime states themselvesFrance, the Netherlands,
perhaps Ireland, but never Britainand in their extensions beyond the
Atlantic to English, French, and Spanish America, a world that Burkes
Annual Register (a journal that he edited) included under the heading
History of Europe, but which Raynal and Diderot showed was hard
to fit into European notions of history. The second event was the growth
of military empires in the great spaces where Europe shades into Eurasia,
which, by partitioning Poland, indicated their power to redefine the statessystem that Europe recognized as part of itself but that existed in a
world western Europeans found very hard to recognize or understand.
In his book Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the
Mind of the Enlightenment, Larry Wolff describes how eighteenth-century
Europeans, as they traveled beyond Germany into Catholic Poland,
Orthodox Russia, and the still Ottoman Balkan Peninsula, felt themselves

Some Europes in Their History

67

to have quite suddenly entered an alien and archaic world of vast distances, enserfed peasantries, and brutal petty officialsa world that corresponded all too easily to their received notions of oriental despotism.
This last concept was not exclusively an invention of maritime imperialism, though of course it was that. It also reflects the encounter of Europe
on its open eastern frontier with forms of government derived from the
Ottoman or Mongol empire or shaped by these empires as they withdrew;
it was a problem for the British in India whether they were going to join
the family of military empires or attempt something different. The indeterminacy of Europe in the East, however, may help explain the rather
strange way in which Larry Wolffs pages are pervaded by the notion
that western Europeans ought not to have evaluated central and eastern
Europe as they did, that it is not for Europeans to decide who is
European and who is not. This reflects the deeply confused way in
which we now think about cultural identity, but it also reflects the fact
that the decision is difficult to make or to avoid. Should we say that the
affairs of former Yugoslavia ought to be arranged by Europe because
they are part of it? Or should we say that this area is a barbaric frontier
(or rather a collision of archaic frontiers in a world still barbaric), which
it is better to avoid trying to control? Should an empire seek to assimilate
its barbarians or to exclude them? If we reply that it should not have
defined them as barbarians in the first place, the question arises of the
terms in which it ought to have understood them. The lands originally
called Europa are those in which Europe experiences a continuing
problem in defining itself.
ANOTHER EUROPE IN HISTORY

But this is to anticipate the history of Europe since the end of the
Enlightened settlement. That was succeeded by the transitory if spectacular Napoleonic interlude, when the revolutionary empire of France over
Latin Europe proved itself very nearly capable of dominating the three
military monarchies of Europes eastward expansion. The resistance of
Austria, Russia, and the maritime empire of Britain over the Atlantic and
Mediterranean led the French empire to overreach itself, collapse, and be
succeeded by an attempt to restore that Europe of several states linked
by treaty and trade in which Enlightened thinkers had seen the security of
civilization. But this Concert of Europe, heir to the early-modern statessystem, had to be guaranteed by, and therefore had to include, the eastward military monarchies themselves: Prussia, Austria, Russia (but not

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the Turkish empire, seen as barbaric, oriental, decadent, and on the

way to relegation to the colonial world over which Europe ruled). The
technology of industrialism transformed the old empires and republics
into formidably unified military states capable of conscripting their entirely willing citizenries into great national armies. An era of great states,
great wars, and great revolutions can be said to have lasted, rather neatly,
from 1789 to 1989, and the United States and Japan to have played their
parts in it. In the history of Europe, we take as cardinal the two world
wars of the twentieth century in which the German empire-state twice
proved that it could simultaneously threaten to dominate the Netherlands
(thus provoking war with France and Britain on the ancient battlegrounds
of historic Europe) and Poland and Ukraine (thus provoking war with
Russia about that great debatable land that geopoliticians used to proclaim the Heartland, declaring that whoever ruled it ruled the world).
Both the world wars were so destructive to Europe that they produced
huge systemic collapses and the intervention of the continental superstates created by European settlements beyond Europe: the United
States of America and the Eurasian empire of Russia. After 1945, and
for the greater part of my adult lifetime, it was a commonplace among
the most trendy historians to say that the European age had ended, and
Europe itself had been partitioned by the intercontinental superpowers.
This prediction has been falsified, and something calling itself Europe
has emerged and claimed a dominant role.
The European Economic Community, then the European Community,
and then the Unionthe names by which it has progressively called
itselfseems to display a series of characteristics. First, it has remained a
Franco-German consortium, a series of arrangements designed to ensure
that France and Germany will not again go to war by inducing them to
merge their institutions and economies to a point where this ceases to
be possible. This laudable aim could not be pursued without drawing in
adjacent populations in Italy and the Low Countries, and so forth. The
economic benefits of Germanys industrial recovery, and other countries,
were such that many were willing to join in the enterprise. But the enterprise entailed inducing democracies to give up their sovereigntywhich is
to say their capacity for self-government. The strategy adopted from the
start was described by one Quebec statesman as tempting lobsters into the
lobster pot, inducing them to take the first step, and then revealing to them
that it was irrevocable, so that no way remained but forward. There is no
phrase commoner in the rhetoric of Europeanism than weor you
have no other choice, language reused in the United States when the

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69

North American Free Trade Agreement was being mooted. When I hear
it said that the separate histories of the Irish or British, French or Spanish,
German or Scandinavian (but not yet Polish or Hungarian and certainly
not, for the foreseeable future, Russian) merge in the history of something
called Europe, which has not been written yet, I wonder what this indeterminacy means, and I think we had better set about writing that history
and seeing how it comes out when we do. There are numerous ways of
writing it, and none will be final.
Second, the institutionalization, and the creation of a mystique, that
went with the idea of a union to be called Europe went on in the
era of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the partition of Europe. This
partition, by which the Soviet Union hoped to protect its domination of
the Heartland, and its own unity, ran well west of the indeterminacies
of that region and cut deep into Latin Europe. It separated Lutheran
East Germany from Catholic West Germany, and Catholic Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia from the western Europe of which they might
be considered extensions. In the era of partition, Europe was far from
clear what it intended to do about the central and eastern Europes, apparently lost to Soviet domination. Its ideology was never in practice what
it was in principle: an affirmation of Catholic-Protestant-Enlightened
Europe against the Orthodox-Muslim Europes and Eurasia now
ruled by a semi-Enlightened Russia. Turned westward, the ideology of
Europe became the instrument of a dispute with its other protector:
France and Germany, the losers in the Second World War, against the
United States as the principal victor, and also against Britain while that
state continued to belong to the maritime world of the British Commonwealth and the special relation. A sense of defeat in that set of relationships led the United Kingdom to accede Europe. Since Europe
has not allayed that sense of defeat, the British relationship to it remains
deeply ambivalent. I speak, of course, as a citizen of the former Commonwealth, but I do so without hesitation. Europe must see itself as a new
Norman Conquest, the Channel Tunnel as a revival of the camp at
Boulogne in 1805. The power of the Napoleonic bureaucracies, now serving the international market, seeks to extend itself over the British Isles.
If Europe was a product of the partition of Europe, it has had
to survive the end of that partition and the downfall, not only of the
Soviet Union, but perhaps also of the Russian state created by Peter
and Catherine and their successors. The door is wider open than at any
time in recent history toward those areas where Europe has no frontiers, and any attempt to withdraw them or extend them must be equally

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arbitrarytoward the old Heartland where Catholic-ProtestantEnlightened Europe shadesintoOrthodox-Muslim-Communist Eurasia,

and toward the ancient original Europa now known as the Balkan
Peninsula, whose problems are still those created by the expansion and
contraction of the Ottoman Empire. Among the innumerable alarming
features of this situationin which the possible disappearance and the
possible renewal of Russian great-power capacity appear equally
threateningoccurs the thought that Europe may now be what
Germany formerly was: an imperial power secure in the Atlantic coastlands but obliged to attempt imperial control in one or both of the great
marchlands to the East. In times gone by this role entailed great-power rivalries and world wars. Unless a Russian great power revives, these should
not occur again, but the history of European and American dealings with
former Yugoslavia brings to light one more characteristic of contemporary
Europe, of which I want to say something before concluding.
CONCLUSION

We have considered two eras in which Europe was defined as a largely

economic entity and doing so was designed to put an end to periods
of destructive war. The first was the era of Enlightenment from 1713
to 1789, when Europe was presented as a republic of states held together by commerce, succeeding and terminating the Wars of Religion and
the threat of universal monarchy. The second is our own. Whereas the
Enlightened theorists invented Europe as a system of states in which
the partnership of civil sovereignty and civil society was necessary to commerce and the spread of manners, we, apparently, are committed to the
submergence of the state and its sovereignty, not in some pan-European
or universal confederation, but in a postmodern era in which the global
market demands the subjugation of the political community and perhaps
of the ethnic and cultural community also; we are to give up being citizens
and behave exclusively as consumers. This is why the European Union is
ineffective as an empire. An organization designed to break the will of
the state to govern itself necessarily reduces its own will to use military
power to police its own frontiers, notably when these lie in parts of the
world where only will can establish where these frontiers lie. The question for the new century is whether we will retain any capacity to govern
ourselves by political means. Unfortunately, the power to decide on the
use of military force cannot be detached from the retention of the former
capacity as completely as we should like. Europe, the cradle of the state,
may be about to discover what it is like to do without it.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I shall not attempt an extensive footnoting of this chapter. It is one of

several essays in which I seek to examine the meaning of Europe. The
others are Deconstructing Europe, History of European Ideas 18, no. 3
(1994): 32946; Vous autres Europeensor Inventing Europe, Acta
Philosophica 14, no. 2 (1993): 14158 (published by the Slovene Academy
of Sciences, Liubliana); and Notes of an Occidental Tourist, Common
Knowledge 2, no. 2 (1993): 15, 818.
The works cited in the text include Robert Bartlett, The Making of
Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 9501350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); The Alexiad of Anna Comnena
(Penguin Classics, 1969); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe:
The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). I cite three Enlightened histories
by Voltaire: Le Si`ecle de Louis XIV (available in English as The Age of
Louis XIV), Essai sur les Moeurs et lEsprit des Nations, and Histoire de
Russia sous Pierre Le Grand. I also cite the following histories: GuillaumeThomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des e tablissements et
du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes, with additions by Denis
Diderot; David Hume (works available from Liberty Classics, Indianapolis); William Robertson, History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V
(Bristol: Thoemmes Publishers, 1998); Edward Gibbon, History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Allen Lane: Penguin
Press, 1994), critical edition by David Womersley.

3
Europe in the Middle Ages
WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN

In the great thirteenth-century collection of poems and songs known as

the Carmina Burana, one of the longer specimens of the versifiers art
opens with the phrase Cum in Orbem Universum, poetically captured
in English as Song of the Vagrant Order. The song takes its starting
point from the Latin imperative Ite (Go forth) and describes the wandering lives of priests, monks, and deacons who bolt their duties. As the poem
continues, the poet characterizes other social groups as travelers, often doing so with a hard and biting sarcastic edge. Besides priests, monks, and
deacons, the wanderers include adolescents and soldiers, tall men and
short men, and scholars. A description repeated in the songalthough
not in precisely the same wordsidentifies the band of vagabonds in territorial terms. At one point the poet describes them as Austrians, Bavarians,
Saxons, and Easterners; at another he sings of Bohemians, Germans,
Slavs, and Italians:
Give to any folk you meet
Reasons for your questing.
As that mens peculiar ways
Seem in need of testing.1

In other words, the poet advises the wanderer to respond to questions

about his purpose by an affirmation of the virtues of cosmopolitanism.
Individual waysthe ways of Austrians or Italianshave to be tested
against the habits, loves, and hatreds of other people.
In this chapter I reflect on the idea of Europe in the High Middle
Ages, the period from about 1050 to 1350. My principal focus is on one
I wish to thank my friend and colleague Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton
University, for his close reading of an earlier version of this essay.
1 The Goliard Poets: Medieval Latin Songs and Satires, trans. George Whicher (New York:
New Directions, 1949), 2739.

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73

prominent characteristic of European civilization in this periodnamely,

the tension between cosmopolitanism, like that lauded in the song quoted
earlier, and intense localism. This theme obviously owes much to current
concerns that are greeting the emerging unity of Europe among which
the grim persistence of its ethnic and religious hatreds is one of the most
important.
The fundamental discussion throughout is political: the emergence of
large units of organization whose power and persistence were always
tested by local loyalties and outright resistance to central authority. This
political theme should not obscure two similar themes, one economic and
one ecclesiastical. In the economic sphere I will look at the growth of markets and interregional and international trade. The sheer growth of population, the spread and growth of towns (especially in Italy), and the place
of the crusades in this wide vision and reality of European identity are addressed as well, albeit in rather broad strokes. In the ecclesiastical sphere
the emphasis will be on the cosmopolitan character of scholasticism, a
term that encompasses the curriculum, method of study, and philosophical concerns of the intellectual elite of Europe. The medium of scholastic
discourse was the Latin language, and thanks to cosmopolitan patterns of
appointment to elite church and educational offices, scholasticism was the
dominant mode of professional thinking and learning from the Atlantic
Coast to the Carpathian Mountains. Academic careers, like that of Saint
Thomas Aquinas, sent Italians to study in Germany and teach in Paris;
administrative careers, like that of Saint Anselm of Aosta, sent southerners to monastic posts in northern duchies and to episcopal offices in
England.2 The system of papal legates, nuncios, and judges-delegate, the
popes eyes and ears in even the most distant provinces of the church,
knitted together the whole in an impressive, if fragile, pan-European administrative network. Over against this cosmopolitanism stands the relative self-sufficiency of the village economy, the extreme parochialism of
rural priests and of the inmates of minor religious establishments, and
the often restrictive impulses associated with concerns for family and
lineage.
At the chronological end of the story, as we shall see, the balance
on all fronts shifted back toward parochialism. Academic and administrative careers, like that of Lanfranc, William the Conquerors friend,
would become rare. Lanfranc, an Italian from Pavia, spent time in Bec in
2

For what we know of the career of Thomas Aquinas, see The Life of Saint Thomas
Aquinas: Biographical Documents, ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster (London: Longman,
Green and Co., 1959); on Anselm, see G. R. Evans, Anselm (London: Chapman, 1989).

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

Normandy governing a major monastery and ended his career as the greatest churchman in England as archbishop of Canterbury. His career was
extraordinary in his own time but almost unthinkable in the late Middle
Ages, say, after 1350 or so.3 Overextension by the papacy and the feudal
states of northern Europe would reveal the systemic weaknesses of both.
And the shocks of war, famine, and plague destabilized the entire array
of European political, economic, and, indeed, cultural systems. Nonetheless, an ideal of unity survived along with vestiges of the old cosmopolitanism. It has never died, and now many hope it is irreversibly in the
ascendant.
No theme, even one as comprehensive as the tension between the local
and the cosmopolitan, can adequately cover three hundred years of history
in Europe, but this one is perhaps better than most. It includes the continuing role played in Europe by the Scandinavians through their diplomatic
alliances, military contributions to the crusades, active engagement in
Baltic and North Sea trade with Scotland, England, the Hanse towns, and
among themselves, long after the Viking invasions were over, the only time
a reader ordinarily encounters Scandinavians in any general consideration
of the Middle Ages. Spain (or, more properly, the Spains), if there were
more space in this chapter, would come in and out of the story in a way
that this region rarely does in traditional pictures of medieval development. Focusing on the recruitment and attraction of soldiers and settlers
from North of the Pyrenees to reconquer territories from the Muslims and
to resettle the conquered land stresses Spains ties to Europe as a whole. In
the same way the diplomatic and marriage alliances of Spanish aristocrats
and the activities of Iberian merchants (Portuguese and Castilian traders
in England; Catalonian throughout the Mediterranean) point to Spains
integration into a manifestly European civilization.
EUROPE

The first issue that needs to be addressed is terminological. People who

thought about toponymy at all, even mapmakers who thought about it
all the time, rarely used the word Europe (Latin, Europa) to describe the
geographical or cultural entity we now call Europe.4 The word of choice
3
4

For Lanfrancs career, see Margaret Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978).
Benjamin Braude, The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d
series, 54 (1997): 109.

Europe in the Middle Ages

75

among the dominant groups in society, at least from the eleventh century
on, was Christianitas (Christendom). We may learn a great deal from this
fact. Europe was where Latin ChristiansRoman Catholic Christians
dominated the political and demographic landscape.5 A profound divide,
symbolized by the mutual excommunication of pope and patriarch of
Constantinople in 1054 and made unbridgeable by westerners occupation of Constantinople (120461) following the Fourth Crusade, separated Catholics from Greek or Orthodox Christians in Russia, the Balkans,
and the Greek peninsula and archipelago. Regions in North Africa and the
Near East, once ruled by Christians and still having substantial sectarian
Christian populations (Copts in Egypt, for example), had come under the
political and demographic dominance of Muslims. Even when Palestine
and its environs temporarily succumbed to Christian political control and
military occupation in the aftermath of the First Crusade (10961100),
Catholic Christians remained a demographic minority among other
Christians in the Near East.
When people spoke of Christendom geographically in, say, the year
1250, they meant the totality of regions we would now call Iceland,
Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, most of Spain and Portugal, all of
Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia,
Moravia, Slovakia, and Croatia. In all these regions the dominant political power was vested in avowed Roman Catholic Christians, and the
clear demographic edge lay with this Glaubensvolk.6 Within these regions
Jews constituted numerically, if not symbolically, an insignificant minority.
The number of Muslims was dwindling (even in the Christian kingdoms
of Spain and in southern Italy and Sicily where the Muslim population
was largest). The political power of Muslims was negligible. Pagans were
being subjugated in the Northeast (what we would now call Finland,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) by Catholic Christians, although the process was not entirely successful. The resistance of the Lithuanians was
especially spectacular and, for a very long time, effective; in 1387, though
under significant military pressure, their ruler would accept Catholic
Christianity voluntarily for diplomatic reasons, not because of any crushing
5
6

See Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Macmillan, 1995),
10, 1617, 346, 3842.
The term Glaubensvolk, used in the way I have used it, is an adaptation of Ulrich
Haarmanns terminology. His comparative treatment of Christendom and Islam in the
Middle Ages and the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is highly
recommended; Glaubensvolk und Nation im islamischen und lateinischen Mittelalter,
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Berichte und Abhandlungen
(Berlin: Academie Verlag, 1996), 2:16199.

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

military defeat or demonstration of insurmountable western technological and logistical superiority. He would acquire the throne of Catholic
Poland in the bargain.7

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when scholars began the
serious study of the Middle Ages, the rise of the state or attempts to discern the peculiar genius of the nation have been at the center of their
concerns. Seeking after Eternal Francethe essence of Francewas, for
example, largely a sixteenth-century innovation.8 This centrality of concern about the state and nation in medieval studies arose because of an
almost manic preoccupation with the balance of power among states.
Scholars wondered how the political units that negotiated the balance of
power had come about. What were their so-called natural borders? Did
a people who constituted a nation have to be one in religion or sect, language, traditions, and in some way lineage?9 Out of a preoccupation with
these questions came patriotic ideologies that, in the case of France, for
example, might sustain people even in the worst of timescivil war, invasion, social revolution.10
To a degree, the surviving sources seemed to point in this direction for
research. Royal clerks had created the greatest archives of documentary
sources, but the church was not far behind with its zealously preserved
and voluminous documentary and chronicle sources.11 The editing of the
ecclesiastical sources usually had less to do with a disinterested wish to
7

8
9

10

11

Although it does not deal with the later phases of the struggle, S. C. Rowells wonderful
book (Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 12951345
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]) describes the pagan Lithuanians greatest successes.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 79, n. 89.
See Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in LateMedieval France, trans. Susan Huston, ed. Frederic Cheyette (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1991), 31025, for an adept summary.
See Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 15001640: An Essay in Historical
Psychology, trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), 1256. For a
slightly earlier period, see Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 3028.
France led the way here with the two massive collections (the first of royal documents,
the second of ecclesiastical records). See Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France,
24 vols., ed. Martin Bouquet and others (Paris: 17341904); the Imprimerie has varied
in its publishing history, depending on the nature of the regime (Imprimerie Royale,
Imprimerie Imperiale, Imprimerie Nationale). On the church see Gallia christiana in
provincias ecclesiasticas distributa, 16 vols. (Paris: 17151865). Its editor and publisher
was the Congregation de Saint-Maur.

Europe in the Middle Ages

77

investigate church history than with a desire to show that the distinctive
form that ecclesiastical history took in this country or that one had much
to do with the irreducible national essence of its people, language, and
culture. The history of the church was a purposive handmaiden to the
history of the state.
In seeking the roots of Frenchness or whatever national essence the
scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were seeking, they
discovered something quite unsettling and called it feudalism. The term
now is under attack: historians question whether they should apply a word
coined by seventeenth-century controversialists to a world like Europe
in the High Middle Ages.12 What they called feudalism reflected their
recognition of the intense fragmentation of loyalties around the rulers of
great fiefs or other large units of property in the medieval past. Given their
teleological concerns with how kingdoms developed, they searched for
keys to explain how great rulers domesticated feudalism and its plethora
of lords by transforming it into a tight and neatly hierarchical system of
government. It was this system of government under a powerful king,
they believed, that allowed the national essence (never actually lost but
hidden sometimes under the debris of anarchy and, at other times, under
Catholic and Imperial universalism) to blossom in their own age.
Despite their teleologies, these controversialists and early scholars were
right about many things. They were right in discerning a tension between
the multiplicity of governing units (like castellanies, viscounties, counties,
and duchies) and the idealistic universalism of the political theorists and
theologians of the Middle Ages. For many of the great intellectuals of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was never much doubt that there
should be and eventually would be only one faith and only one Imperium.
Below the level of the great thinkers and the great lords of kingdoms,
duchies, and counties, there was a bewildering variety of local cultures.13
They might be clan-based, as in Scotland and Ireland, or caste-like, as
in Wales, or male-dominated but otherwise far more egalitarian, as in
Scandinavia. Most people would have expressed their deepest loyalties
in a vocabulary dominated by these local realities. But the sources most
accessible to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars spoke hardly a
word about these multiple worlds. Despite present-day sensitivity in the
historical profession to the plight of the lowly and the desire to fill the
12
13

Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
For a useful overview, see Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western
Europe, 9001300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

silences, the lack of sources remains the great barrier to any simple reconstruction of the so-called authentic voices of subordinate groups in the
European Middle Ages.
The diversity of material life among the various groups that occupied
the landscape in the High Middle Ages underscores the fragmentation endemic in society.14 Basic facts of medieval demography suggest widely disparate densities of population and a great unevenness in the incidence of
towns. Agricultural technologies varied because of the many different soil
types, not to mention the gross differences in the topography and hydrography between northern Europe (well-watered and cold) and southern
Europe (dry and hot).
Still the attraction of and adherence to an ideal of universalism stimulated an arresting cosmopolitanism that transcended the narrow loyalties
of village and town and even the wider loyalties of lordship and kingdom.
It ripped boys and men (and girls and women, although to a far lesser extent) out of their parochial networks and transformed their lives and the

life of society at large. A girl from Domremy, a tiny village on the Saone
far from anyones heartland, would think thoughts about France and
England and the church of God that would change the world. We know
of her, of course, as Joan of Arc.15 Economic developments were crucial
to this possibility.
THE ECONOMY

Underpinning these developments was the booming population in

Europe.16 It is hard to explain why population began to rise, steeply
and steadily, around the year 1100 or perhaps slightly before. Although
massive external invasions had come to an end, there was no long period
of internal peace in Europe. England suffered various forms of disorder,
perhaps even some anarchy, during the first half of the twelfth century,
and civil wars as well as wars with France occupied productive resources
for much of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. In addition to petty internal wars and the long struggle with England, France
endured the bitter conflict known as the Albigensian Crusade. The Holy
14

15
16

For a brief introduction to this subject, see Hans-Werner Goetz, Life in the Middle Ages
from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century, ed. Steven Rowan, trans. Albert Wimmer
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 923.
For a readable biographical study, see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female
Heroism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).
Philippe Contamine and others, LEconomie medievale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993),
1416, 21114.

Europe in the Middle Ages

79

Roman Empire drifted in and out of civil war over and over again, and
partly because of the repercussions in Italy of the German emperors disputes with the popes over their respective political and spiritual powers,
it is not easy to see why the peninsulas population grew significantly.
It is possible, of course, that unusual spells of mild weather in the
growing season improved harvests and nutrition and encouraged or at
least permitted larger families. It is possible, too, that changes in field
systems, the diffusion of established technologies like the heavy plow in
the North, new methods of crop rotation, and the introduction of new
crops, especially beans and peas, or their diffusion on a grand scale, had
similar effects. These positions have been strenuously argued by generations of scholars, but they remain largely conjectures. What is fact is
simply the take-off in population. Gross estimates see a rise from about
25 million Europeans in the year 1100 to 80 million or more by the year
1300.17
The growth of population, most of it in the countryside, stimulated
the spread of rural markets. Recent estimates see a peak in the creation
of periodic markets in the thirteenth century throughout the British Isles
and in region after region on the continent. Some of these regions, like
Germany, had ten times as many markets in 1300 as thay had in the
eleventh century. This expansion permitted the movement of labor, goods,
and money more efficiently and in a more widely flung network or series
of economic networks than had ever existed in the North of Europe before
or had been in existence in southern Europe since the fall of the Roman
Empire.
Southern Europe led the way, especially in the growth and sophistication of towns.18 Northern Italy, particularly Lombardy and Tuscany, were
to provide Europe a cradle for bourgeois values. By the end of the thirteenth century, Florence, Milan, Genoa, and Venice had populations close
to 100,000. Only Paris and perhaps London, in the North, were comparable. The demand for provisions created by these urban agglomerations
in Italy and unevenly elsewhere (along the Baltic Coast, in Flanders, on
the eastern shore of the Iberian peninsula, to name the most important
places where towns flourished) stimulated food production and industry
in all their hinterlands.
17

18

Unless otherwise noted, the information in this paragraph and the next several on the
structures of society, the role of technology, the influence of markets, and other aspects
of the economy is from my book The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early
Fourteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 438, 8796,
12734.
In general, see Contamine, Economie medievale, 18594.

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

The magnitude of the growth of population, the rapid proliferation of

rural markets that ensued, and the urban resurgence led to the development of increasingly dense networks of regional and international trade.
As a result, by the year 1300 prices and wages in the economy of Europe
were genuinely responsive to supply and demand, despite the continuing moral hegemony of the doctrine of the just price, one aspect of which
stressed the sin of charging high prices for subsistence goods in times of extreme scarcity. By the end of the thirteenth century, even eastern Germany
and western Poland had insinuated themselves in the international trade
networks dependent on the existence of these markets. In the year 1300
rye from Brandenburg was available for sale in Flanders. Although the
crusades to the Holy Land were in no sense primarily economic ventures, they indirectly testify to the networks by which products of the
East came to the West and vice versa in a seemingly endless rhythm of
exchange.19
What was the converse of these economic developments? For every
merchantor man with dusty feet, as he was picturesquely named in the
Middle Agestraveling a road that led from Italy through the Alpine
passes North to Germany or traversing the sun-baked routes from the
Mediterranean ports of Spain and southern France to the cities of the
plains, there were scores of petty retailers who never saw more than two
or three marketplaces in their lives. For them the word silk or the
plethora of words for exotic spices would remain only words. Yet at least
they knew the words. When one sees today pictures from the Third World,
where poor people, apparently isolated from the global community, wear
sweatshirts emblazoned with the logos and legends of the Chicago Bulls
or the Dallas Cowboys, one recognizes that isolation is relative. The same
may be said of rustics and artisans, like Peter Saracen, a man dwelling in a
medieval village in the heartland of western Europe, say the mountains of
Auvergne in central France, far from the real Saracens, the Moors, living
on the Spanish frontier or the Muslims besieging the crusaders outposts
in Syria. In the thirteenth century someone knew that the people of this
village were part of an adventure that pitted Christians and Saracens in
deadly combat a thousand miles away. One need not believe that Peter
Saracen had any sympathy for Saracens merely because he bore the name,
anymore than wearers of American sweatshirts in Lebanon today
19

Jonathan Riley-Smith, Early Crusaders to the East and the Costs of Crusading, 1095
1130, in Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to
Aryeh Grabois on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Goodich and others (New York:
Peter Lang, 1995), 23757.

Europe in the Middle Ages

81

necessarily love the United States. But, like Peter Saracen of Auvergne,
they know they are part of a wider world.20
THE ECCLESIASTICAL WORLD

That world was defined by the Latin church. Universalismincorporation

of all people through baptism in the Christian community, irrespective of
color, ethnic origin, place of settlement, or previous beliefswas a central element of the ideology and objectives of the Catholic church. The
twin legacies of early medieval missionary activity before the year 1000
and of monastic reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries provided the
conditions for translating ideology into practice. The earlier medieval missions had aimed to increase the sheer territorial expanse of Christianity.21
Famous examples include the sixth-century mission to the Anglo-Saxons,
sponsored by the papacy, which brought England into the Catholic fold
and the ninth- and tenth-century missions to the Scandinavians and other
northern peoples culminating in their general conversion. These missionary activities, in one sense, made Christianity a genuinely European-wide
religion.
The second impulse, after universalism, was monastic reform. It is
usually, though perhaps exaggeratedly, associated with the great monastery of Cluny in Burgundy and the other houses in the Cluniac order
that nurtured an idyllic vision of the organization and dignity of the
clerical community.22 What the reform accomplished was the creation
of centers or locations, including Cluny, for the dissemination of this
idyllic vision of Catholic universalism. Out of the ferment of monastic
reform arose a largely new form of the institutional church, one that
looked down upon localism in favor of centralindeed papalcontrol.
In the end the papacy came to be seen by many reformers as the best
guarantor of Catholic universalism and, partly in response to this, papal
spokesmen arrogated to the office of the pope wide authority in managing religious affairs and protecting the freedom of the ecclesiastical
community.
20

21
22

The real Petrus Sarraceni of Auvergne may be encountered in a judicial action recorded
in the thirteenth-century Enquetes administratives dAlfonse de Poitiers, ed. PierreFrancois Fournier and Pascal Guebin (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1959), 154.
For a breathtaking evocation of the period, see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western
Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 2001000 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996).
For a reasoned evaluation of the subject, with due emphasis on German developments,
see C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe
in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 8092.

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This transformation occurred in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and was seemingly secure in the thirteenth. A 1994 book on Pope
Innocent III, the pope who reigned at the turn of the twelfth/thirteenth
century, can use the subtitle Leader of Europe without apparent irony.23
The achievement of papal monarchy came at a great price, however.
Violence resulted from the attack on extreme forms of sacred kingship.
Hitherto, the dominant theory had vested power over the church and
churchmen in the king or emperor. In the eleventh century ecclesiastical
reformers contested the theory. The struggle between emperor and pope
that ensued, usually referred to as the Investiture Controversy, turned on
the alleged right of the former to confer the staff and ring on newly elected
bishops.24
The staff and ring were the symbols of spiritual, not secular, authority.
The staff represented the bishops right to bring the errant sheep back
into the fold. In other words, it meant the bishop could exercise the
magisteriumto say what the Catholic faith wasand to enforce his
view against heretics. The staff also represented the power to beat away
wild dogs and wolves, enemies of the Christian faith from outside the
fold, and to sanction the use of force for the protection of the Christian
faithful. The ring symbolized the marriage of the bishop to his diocese,
his unbreakable union with the people whom he protected, served, and
loved.
No king or emperor, the radical reformers argued, had any right to
bestow such authority. The church rested firmly on the foundation of the
apostles and their successors, the bishops. (Thou art Peter and upon this
rock I will build my church.) Only bishops ought to bestow the powers
symbolized by the staff and ring on bishops-elect.
The problem was that, for centuries, customs had grown up contrary
to this view. The reform movement of the eleventh century challenged
these entrenched customs. As the leader of the reform party pointed out,
Christ did not say I am custom, but I am Truth. Civil wars in Germany
and confrontations in other countries resulted in hard-fought victories for
the ecclesiastical reformers position. But they also undermined political
universalism. As a result of this struggle, the claim of the Holy Roman
Emperor to universal secular rule eroded. The weakening of Imperial
23
24

Jane Sayers, Innocent III: Leader of Europe, 11981216 (London and New York:
Longman, 1994).
Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth
to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). On the
parameters of reform, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Europe in the Middle Ages

83

control in northern Italy where it had once been strong is the clearest
example of this reality.
One can characterize the discourse of those who debated problems of
the internal organization of the church, church-state relations, and doctrinal and legal matters as scholastic. Scholasticism was supranational,
like the language of its expression, Latin. The adjective scholastic, of
course, covers many sins and obscures many nuances, but to some extent the word is a good one, for it emphasizes the general role of schools
and, most important for our purposes, the specific role of the schools of
higher learning as institutional sites for the production and exchange of
knowledge.25
The number of universities even by the year 1250 was very small:
Bologna in northern Italy, Montpellier in southern France, Paris in northern France, Oxford in England, and a handful of others. Although the
number of universities or places of general studies (studia generalia) was
small, or perhaps because their number was small, they were truly international institutions.26 They were also valuable in providing training for
future administrators of churches and principalities. Therefore, there was
a vested interest over time for individual princes and towns to have their
own local universities. The late Middle Ages would see a profound undermining of early university cosmopolitanism.27 Although pretensions
to cosmopolitanism never vanished, localism began to prevail toward the
end of the fourteenth century. I am tempted to see a parallel in my home
institution, Princeton. Scholars there talk often of their contributions and
loyalty to the world of learning, but the university motto is Princeton in
the nations service.
25

26

27

The title of R. W. Southerns Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, I:

Foundations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995) promises more than the book delivers,
but it should be remembered that this is only the first volume of a projected trilogy.
Happily, the introduction to volume one (pages 1 to 13) does offer an informed, not to
say impassioned, defense of the universalism of scholasticism, precisely the point I am
trying to make in this chapter.
The divisions of their student bodies into nationes demonstrates that the word cosmopolitanism obscures, even in the early stage of the universities history, certain centrifugal tendencies.
Alan Cobban, Reflections on the Role of Medieval Universities in Contemporary Society, in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson,
ed. Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon
Press, 1992), 234: Whereas several of the early universities, including Bologna, Paris,
Montpellier and Salamanca, had been cosmopolitan centres of learning which transcended national boundaries and local allegiances, universities of the later medieval period were founded by kings, princes and city authorities as symbols of national, provincial
or civic prestige. Stripped of their supranational character, universities were viewed increasingly as integral parts of political territorial units, designed to serve the requirements
of national institutions and to be of benefit to the local community.

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

Latin was the universal language of the higher schools and of university life in general.28 In castles and towns men who were enemies of
Peter Abelard said of his books, they replace light with darkness. They
perceived his books to be dangerous not only for their content but also for
their reach: they pass from one race to another, and from one kingdom to
another. They cross the oceans, they leap over the Alps . . . they spread
through the provinces and the kingdoms.29 In many places this structure
of diffusion remained intact in the universities until the eighteenth century. When Christian Thomasius started to lecture in German instead of
Latin at the University of Leipzig in 1687, the event, the first of its kind,
was a shock and caused a scandal.30 It also sounded the death knell
the inevitable collapseof Latin as the universal language of university
instruction.
To be sure, even in the thirteenth century, when Latin was providing a glue binding the intellectual elite in universities and the universal church, the vernaculars were providing a basis for a countervailing
localism.31 The early influence of churchmen in newly Christianized,
northern European governments had made Latin the official language
of record in many courts and administrative bureaus. In the thirteenth
century this monopoly collapsed; in the fourteenth, Latin was in retreat
except as tradition and prestige required it in certain kinds of records and
transactions. In the fourteenth century and later, however, the languages of
pleading in the hundreds of new courts across Europe and the languages
of recording the decisions were vernacular.
As literatures began to emerge or re-emerge in vernaculars in the twelfth
and with a vengeance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, distinctive regional or national traditions and genres emerged. Latin literature
became learned literature, the literature of high theology, ethics, political
theory, jurisprudence, and natural philosophy. It was somewhat remote,
28

29

30

31

For perceptive brief analyses of the use of Latin in the Middle Ages, see the essays on the
Varieties of Medieval Latinity, in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographic
Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University
Press, 1996).
Quoted in C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals
in Medieval Europe, 9501200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994),
239. For other examples of scholastic cosmopolitanism, see 16.
On Christian Thomasius, sometimes characterized as the author of the second German
Reformation, see Werner Schmidt, Ein vergessener Rebell: Leben und Wirken des
Christian Thomasius (Munich: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1995).
On the problematic status of the vernacular in France, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing
the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 667.

Europe in the Middle Ages

85

at best, if not absolutely divorced from everyday life, except when schoolboys forced to learn it wrote scurrilous screeds.
Stilus nam et tabule
sunt feriales epule,
et Nasonis carmina
vel aliorum pagina.
(Pen and ink and copy-book,
How funereal they look;
Ovids songs, how dull with age,
Still more any others page.)32

The lively literature of stories and novellas, love poetry and satires, and
personal letters among middling people found expression in the vernacular. It is true that one vernacular enjoyed a privileged status and, with
that, a certain cosmopolitan flair. This was French.33 Many people spoke
versions of it as a native language across what we would call northern
France, as did the nobility and gentry in England and the administrative
elite in southern France. Many commercial and military types throughout
the Mediterranean spoke a lingua franca that built itself on the skeletal
structure of the language of Paris, a fact that owes much to the prominence of northern Frenchmen and women in the crusades. In an Italian
jail at the end of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo dictated the famous
tale of his Asian travels in a form of merchants Franco-Italian that literate
upper-class persons living almost anywhere on the northern shores of the
Mediterranean might have puzzled out.34
Among the upper classes, facility in French continued to be common
long after the Middle Ages; among those who aspire to Culture with a
capital C, a French word or phrase, properly pronounced in conversation, seldom hurts even now. But otherwise regional and national vernaculars steadily displaced Latin and French in the late Middle Ages,
ultimately reducing Latin to a dead language (the phrase is common
in English from the Enlightenment on) and leaving French in Europe to
the French and some of their Belgian, Swiss, and (a few isolated) Italian
neighbors.
32
33

34

Goliard Poets, 223. The reference to Ovids songs is explained by the fact that students
improved their Latin by memorizing and imitating a very sanitized version of the poems.
R. A. Lodge, Language Attitudes and Linguistic Norms in France and England in
the Thirteenth Century, in Thirteenth Century England, IV, ed. P. Coss and S. Lloyd
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1992), 78.
The manuscript history of Marco Polos Travels is complex. The most likely linguistic circle of the original was a variety of French. See The Travels of Marco Polo, ed.
M. Komroff (New York and London: Liveright, 1953), xxv.

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

In the High Middle Ages it was different. Bearing written messages

in Latin, the pope at Rome delegated men to represent his dignity across
Europe. These legates, nuncios, and judges-delegate provided the essential
and routine links between the universal papacy, centered at Rome, and the
most distant parts of Christendom.35 Chosen for their intelligence, loyalty to the pope and papal monarchy, diplomatic skills, and energy, these
men moved comfortably from one region to another. John of Abbeville,
a town in northern France, was papal legate in Spain in the 1220s. Guala
Bicchieri, the Italian, was sent by Pope Innocent III (an Italian who had
studied in Paris) to be papal legate in England, and he served on the triumvirate that governed the northern kingdom after the death of King
John in 1216.
Careers like these were standard, even for men who did not reach
the very top of their professions. Giles of Verracclo was born in Monte
Cassino in Italy. His first serious appointment in the church was as
archdeacon of Thessalonika in Greece in 1218. The next year he traveled
more than a thousand miles to serve as archdeacon of Ely in the Fenland
of East Anglia in England. Through the early 1220s he was a presence at
the papal curia in Rome and served successively as papal legate to Croatia
(1229), nuncio to Hungary (1230), and nuncio to Apulia in southern Italy
thereafter.36
In the early fourteenth century the pattern continued.37 Thomas of
Strasbourg, born in Hagenau in Germany, attended schools in Strasbourg
and Padua. He served the Augustinian Order in Venice (1332), in Paris
(13359), and in the Rhineland and Swabia (13547). Hermann of
Schildesche, schooled in northern Germany, taught in western and central Germany at Magdeburg and Erfurt and served his order for nearly a
decade in Paris before returning to eastern Germany to finish his career.
There is no reason to multiply what could easily become a thousand
examples.
35

36

37

For a precise exposition of the differences among these offices, see Richard Schmutz,
Medieval Papal Representatives: Legates, Nuncios, and Judges-Delegate, Studia Gratiana 15 (1972): 44163. The differences do not affect the point I am making in the
text.
Nicholas Vincent, The Election of Pandulph Verracclo as Bishop of Norwich (1215),
in Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 68 (1995):
1545.
On the examples I cite, see Christopher Ocker, Johannes Klenkok: A Friars Life, c. 1310
1374 (transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 83, pt. 5; Philadelphia,
1993), 5, n. 9. Parallel examples may be found in the foreign appointments to the Scottish
prelacy in the High Middle Ages. See Bruce Webster, Medieval Scotland: The Making of
an Identity (London: St. Martins Press, 1997), 11331.

Europe in the Middle Ages

87

The opposite kind of career, one that would make a native cleric into
a papal legate in his native land, was still rare. By the fourteenth century
this pattern became more common and eventually came to dominate.
The archbishop of Canterbury, to give one example, would have legatine
powers bestowed on him because of his office and rank in the English
church in the late Middle Ages. The problem was that a system originally designed to bring the disparate parts of the Catholic church into
obedience with Rome was more likely in the Renaissance and on the eve
of the Reformation to reinforce divisions within Christendom and dissent
from the papacy. Instead of men like John of Abbeville and Guala
Bicchieri, the later system produced men like Cardinal Wolsey, the illfated English prelate with the office of legate in England during the reign
of Henry VIII.
Yet even at its heyday in the thirteenth century, the cosmopolitanism
of career patterns and of other linkages in the church was in tension
with the local interests of churchmen with far more restricted outlooks.
There were thousands and thousands of monasteries and priories (small,
dependent houses) in Europe. Most of the administrators of these institutions necessarily focused their attention on events and problems
within about a five- or ten-kilometer radius of their buildings and estates. They often resented the time that they had to spend going to local and provincial councils to report on their activities to the powerful
men, often aliens because of the cosmopolitanism of the church, who
flourished in the network described earlier.38 They even more deeply resented having to pay the taxes and levies that made it possible to sustain the universal church and to carry out transnational, indeed supranational, projects like crusades. To be sure, there were those among
them who looked with envy at the career patterns, the contacts, the
power, and the prestige of the men who claimed to be governing the
world, but envy unfulfilled ate away, like a cankerworm, at the vaunted
unity of the Catholic church. And sometimes anti-alien feeling spilled
38

See Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics, 12051238
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37. Vincent extends this observation to the consequences of cosmopolitan recruitment to secular governmental offices:
Unfortunately for the aliens themselves, the very fidelity and cosmopolitanism that
earned them gratitude and reward from the crown were the selfsame factors that served
to heighten their unpopularity. More generally on the growth of anti-alien feeling in the
thirteenth century (including the promulgation of legislation against aliens in England,
for example), see D. A. Carpenter, King Henry IIIs Statute against Aliens: July 1263,
in The Reign of Henry III (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1996),
26180.

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W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

over into violence, pitting alien churchmen against natives and their lay
allies.39
By the end of the Middle Ages, certainly by the fifteenth century, the
faultlines in such unity as there was became major fissures. Heresy was
a serious problem, but one that churchmen confronted continually and
in an urgent way from the twelfth century onward.40 What made dealing
with heresy more difficult in the late Middle Ages was a distressing turn
of events, the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the Church.41 In the early
and mid-fourteenth century (130576), the popes ruled from Avignon
rather than from Rome. Ostensibly papal officials justified their reluctance
to reside in Rome by invoking the appalling political conditions of the
eternal city. But the shift of residence to Avignon, coming as it did in
the wake of a humiliating papal confrontation with the French crown,
contributed to the widespread perception that the popes had come under
the domination of France. It did not help to overcome this perception that
the men chosen as popes in the seventy-odd years of the captivity were
Frenchmen.
The Great Schism (13781417), initiated by an attempted return of
the papacy to Rome, was of equal importance in undermining its moral
authority, a pillar of its claim to universal obedience. The schism produced two lines of popes and thus divided Christians according to those
loyal to the Roman and allegedly more independent line and those who
supported the Avignonese papacy, stigmatized by its enemies as a French
puppet. The dispute would end in compromise, but the legacy of that
compromise was almost as dangerous as the schism itself. The decision to
yield to the judgment of an ecumenical council seemed to some observers
to support the troubling assertion, already debated in the two centuries
before, but now given great urgency, that a council was superior to the
pope.42 Conciliarism, as a movement and an ideology, was not defined by
this radical interpretation of its meaning. Moderate conciliarists merely
argued that in the peculiarly difficult circumstances of the early fifteenth
century, recourse to a council made sense. Moderates did not champion
39
40
41

42

Vincent, Peter des Roches, 303.

Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform
to the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1992).
On the late medieval church and the problems treated in this and the next paragraph,
see Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1979).
On the origins of conciliarism, see Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar
Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955).

Europe in the Middle Ages

89

the end of universal papal monarchy or the devolution of doctrinal authority, although a century later, because of the Reformation, both came
to be, to some degree, accomplished facts.
CONCLUSION

In the High Middle Ages there was a strong and creative tension between
cosmopolitan values and local concerns, universalism and parochialism.
This chapter has concentrated on the political, economic, and ecclesiastical aspects of medieval life, but others are equally revealing. Recently, for
example, Manlio Bellomo has argued for a commonality (a ius commune)
of legal principles and terminology that existed in a symbiotic relationship
with local legal systems (iura propria) in high medieval Christendom. He
has suggested, too, that this commonality survived the birth of modernity
and persisted until the nineteenth century. In his view scholars have been
remiss in their aberrant fascination with local particularities of the law, a
fascination that has blinded them to the fundamental unity of medieval
European civilization.43
The artistic component of the tension between cosmopolitanism and
localism, another feature of this story, is as fascinating as the political,
economic, religious, and legal components. In the twelfth century there
emerged a distinctively European style in architecture. French in origin,
the Gothic became the cutting-edge style of artistic production in the
twelfth century from northern Britain to the Holy Land and from Spain
and Italy northward to the Baltic Coast. It continued as the exemplary
style for at least two centuries.
Recent research, however, emphasizes two points, First, local conditions put constraints on the international style, thereby stimulating the
birth of new and distinctive regional styles. Second, indigenous styles
sometimes enjoyed a syncretic relationship with the Gothic without being dominated by it. Sometimes these styles continued their lively growth
through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries independent of Gothic influences.44 What was true of architecture was true of styles in painting and
glass that flourished in the Ile-de-France and are sometimes thought to
have swept away everything in their path as they became the European
standard. No such failure or weak-willed retreat occurred, despite a
43
44

Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800, trans. Lydia Cochrane
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1995).
Jean Bony, French Gothic Architecture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 24950, 41163.

90

W ILLIAM C HESTER J ORDAN

certain degree of stylistic coherence that drew on French models and is

discernible in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century European painting and
stained glass.45
The point is that a set of ideals about the proper ordering of life culminated in a spectacularly overarching attempt in the High Middle Ages to
create institutions and practices that allowed those ideals, grouped under
the twin rubrics of cosmopolitanism and universalism, to be achieved.
Nothing was so difficult as to sustain this achievement in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries against the pressures of a persistent localism, itself
perpetuated by the relative technological and logistical primitiveness of
the coercive forces at the center. But the ideals, and to some extent the
institutions and practices, endured in the face of localism. Greater challenges had to be faced toward the end of the thirteenth century and in
the fourteenth century as a result of regional patriotism and the multiple crises at the center of papal government such as the Babylonian
Captivity and the Great Schism. And one might add as well the extraordinary natural and man-made disasters that affected all European life in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: famines, persistent class warfare in
the countryside and in the towns, not to mention the multiple attacks of
plague and of other pestilences.46 Under these pressures many Europeans
continued to affirm the unity of their culture and their common purpose.
This is nothing short of remarkable. European unity today is faced with
far fewer contradictions. It may emerge victorious in the long struggle
with parochialism and prejudiceas long as the idealists and bureaucrats
of unity do not in their hope, or perhaps in their hubris (coercive power
is much stronger now), aim quite so high as their predecessors did in the
High Middle Ages.
45

46

Meredith Lillich, The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 12501325
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). See her cautionary
remarks on pages 221 and 3212 as well as her views on resistance to and regional
adaptation of Parisian styles in painted and stained glass. Her examples come from
western France.
The bibliography on these problems is immense. In particular, see Europa 1400: Die Krise

des Spatmittelalters,
ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1984).

4
The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea
of Europe
HANS W. BLOM

In 1622 Pieter de la Court, who was both a cloth manufacturer in Leiden

and, together with his brother Johann, one of the most influential political
and economic theorists of the seventeenth century, set out the principles
of the Interests of Holland and West-Friesland in the book that bore
this title. In it he described the political institutions and policy aims of the
Dutch predominantly in terms of the economic conditions of their society.
Profitable occupations, thrivingmarkets,and a numerous population were
among the main attributes of what he believed to be the welfare of the
people. The main sources of welfare were, he believed, to be found in
fishing and trade, and in particular maritime trade. These occupations
were well suited to the actual conditions of the Low Countries, provided an income for many, and attracted people from abroad to add
to the population, thereby helping to establish the conditions for even
greater welfare. The political institutions appropriate to sustain this economy could be easily summarized as religious tolerance and responsible
government.
De la Court maintained that the freedom of the individual was essential
to promote profitable economic activities, since only by consulting ones
self-interest would citizens be able to make the right choices. The epitome
of freedom is to have the opportunity to think for oneself and to learn
from ones mistakes. Religious dogmatism frustrates such a development,
while bringing the churchs interference with the proper ways of politics
in its wake. Moreover, responsible government is mainly a matter of the
ruling elite being tied to the interest of the people at large.
This might be most easily understood in the Harringtonian sense of
electing the elite from among the most important class of society. Although
for his English contemporary and fellow republican James Harrington
that class was the landowners, for de la Court it could only be the
91

92

HANS W. BLOM

merchants. De la Court was not nave about this connection. He did not
believe that there will automatically be a correspondence of interests between rulers and citizens engaged in comparable occupations. His model
was rather that of how best to divide a cake: one party cuts it, the other
chooses first. Rulers must be prevented from the misuse of their power
by being responsible to the law, and to their successors. Free citizens, a
political order geared to further the conscious pursuit of self-interest, and
an adequate macroeconomic structure are de la Courts guarantees for
promoting public well-being.1
In his analysis de la Court seems to take for granted that Holland
represents a coherent economic unity. He emphasizes its natural conditions (lack of local resources and therefore the necessity to trade, maritime location and thence the necessity for maritime occupations) as its
uniform characteristic and the nations boundaries determined by this
characteristic. At the same time, however, de la Court defends the superiority of the republican form of government in a discussion of ancient
and modern political regimes. Monarchies and oligarchic aristocracies for
various reasons are less likely to promote the peoples welfare, whatever
the circumstances. The close connection between market and polity
is thereby subsumed under a more general theory of political efficiency.
It is this combination that suggests itself as an argument against
Machiavellian expansionist republicanism, and indeed there is a very
noticeable irenical tone to the writings of this Dutch merchant and
publicist.
The connection between de la Courts general republicanism and his
understanding of the specific interests of Holland is based on the insight
that national boundaries in general correspond to the unique national
characteristics of each individual market-cum-polity: a notion of the international state-system as an interdependence of individual variety. Peace
should result from each countrys understanding that war is only meant
to satisfy the desire for the glory of monarchs and is always detrimental
to the interests of the people. From this perspective a vision of Europe
ensues that is both realistic and irenical, together allowing for national
differences and peaceful cooperation.
De la Court was a practical man. He was an independent but devout
Protestant, who understood the frailty of man and articulated a political
1

Literature in English on de la Courtin particular from a contextual perspective

is scarce. For a first introduction, see Noel Malcolm, Hobbes and Spinoza, in The
Cambridge History of Political Thought, 14501700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 53057.

The Republican Mirror

93

theory in accordance with that understanding. He was not a self-conscious

philosopher. But he profited from contemporary philosophy. (His sister
was married to the Leiden Cartesian philosopher Adriaan Heereboord.)
Later, philosophers, most famously Spinoza, elaborated on his practical
political works.
He did have an axe to grind, however. His political ambition was to
weaken dogmatic Protestantism and to provide arguments for a government by the States without the Stadhouder. Contemporary critics referred
to de la Court, son of a Flemish immigrant, as the Walloon, who tried
to introduce unacceptable novelties into Dutch politics. They poked fun at
him and quoted the arch-republican Hugo Grotius in their support. Some
decried him as a new Cromwell or the Quaker from Leiden. Nevertheless, all agreed with him that while politics is about the well-being of
the people, the principle of politics is self-interest.
In what follows I propose to show how this commercial republicanism came about and what it implied for the Dutch perspective of the
European order. It was, of course, Montesquieu who first pronounced the
verdict on the fate of republicanism that by now has become commonplace: since republics depend on civic virtue (that is, the preference of the
public interest over private interests) and commercial republics depend
on equality, classical republics will be unable in the long run to withstand corruption in this world of vanity, and commercial republics will
always ultimately succumb to luxury. For Montesquieu republics require
the constant challenge of external threat if they are to maintain their civic
spirit.2 Monarchies, on the other hand, thrive on ambition, luxury, and
reason of state. This is obviously contrary to de la Courts picture of a
republic.
The question I will attempt to answer in this essay is thus twofold: Does
there, in fact, exist an essentially modern and commercial republicanism
that, contrary to Montesquieus diagnosis, is able to survive the threat
of corruption and luxury? And secondly, can we model our notion of
Europe on this republicanism rather than on the image of the nation-state
that Montesquieu offers as an alternative? In an attempt to answer these
questions, I will first provide an interpretation of Dutch republicanism,
including its view of Europe, and then, in the light of this, analyze the
debate over the possibility of a republican Europe.
Dutch republicanism integrated the arguments of the reason-of-state
theorists and replaced civic humanism with the language of self-interest.
2

See, in particular, Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, III, 7; IV, 5; VIII, 5; VII, 24; XX, 5.

94

HANS W. BLOM

It was out of tune with the generally megalomaniac and millenarian

notions prevalent in many of the other states in Europeof which the
Spanish Habsburgs are an early, and Napoleon a later, case. It also was
at odds with the republican critics of Divine Right.3 I propose to
discuss Dutch republicanism in more detail by drawing attention to
the political discussions of the late 1610sto which Grotius was an
important contributorand late 1640sthe debates leading up to the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648in order to describe the context for important political notions that emerged in the debates around de la Court
and Spinoza in the 1660s and 1670s. In conclusion, I will take up the
issue of the reflection of the idea of Europe in the mirror of Dutch
republicanism.
My basic presupposition is that the idea of Europe is strongly related
to the political economy of Europe. Bernard Mandeville, writing in the
1720s, rightly understood that what was needed was a new synthesis of
reason of state, self-preservation, and Christian morality (or humanity, for
that matter). Insofar as present-day Europe is still attempting to achieve
a secularized form of this synthesis, one has every reason to follow de la
Court and his contemporaries in their quest.
As a theme in early-modern politics, nonparochialism was developed
in republicanismnot necessarily in civic humanism as opposed to natural law theory (iusnaturalismo), as J. G. A. Pocock maintains, but rather
in republicanism as a discourse.4 Republicarians have been necessarily
concerned with the international ramifications of their political models
precisely because they have a linkage conception of politics. Traditionally,
this latter attribute has been regarded as related to warfare, along classical Machiavellian lines: to defend ones liberty, one must be prepared
to expand the limits of ones state because foreign competitors need to
be eliminated and because the desire for glory needs to be satisfied in
order to maintain civic virtue. With the advent, however, of a broader
and more culture-oriented conception of civic life (education, learning,
religion, commerce), the republican notion of linkage acquired a different tone. Different conceptions of unity in diversity sprang up, as in
the eighteenth-century notion of a Republic of Letters. Attempts were
3

For a discussion of this line of republican argument in relation to de la Court, see the
introduction to Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims Discussed and Refelled, ed. H. W. Blom,
E. O. G. H. Mulier, and R. Janse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), MS
16634.
See, for example, Quentin Skinner, Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998); Hans W. Blom, Causality and Morality in Politics: The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch
Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (Rotterdam, 1995).

The Republican Mirror

95

made, on the one hand, to define human nature and, on the other, to
rephrase the value of national distinctions. This allowed for a new, republican understanding of sovereignty as an attribute of the polity or
respublica. It stressed the reality of sovereignty as an adaptive system of
human interaction rather than its legal formality.
A republican understanding of Europe became henceforth an enlargement upon this theme. As Pieter de la Court phrased it:
In a word, all consists in this, Whether they that enter into a League, have a
common Interest to avoid or obtain that which they have both in their Eye. [But if
that common interest is absent,] Words, Hand, and Seal . . . hold no proportion to
preponderate and resist the Ambition, Covetousness, Lust, Rage, and Self-conceit
of great Princes. . . . Ambition exceeds all other Affections . . . [s]o that the best
way is not to trust them, and then we shall not be cheated. . . . Which is quite
contrary in all Republics, where the Rulers and Magistrates being first educated
as common Citizens, must daily converse with their Equals or Superiors, and
learn that which is just, otherwise they would be compelled to their Duty by the
Judge, or other Virtuous and Powerful Civil Rulers. . . . Custom is a second Nature,
which is not easily altered. . . . [A] Republican Government in all Countries of the
World . . . would be much more advantageous to the People than a Government by
a single Person.5

THE RISE OF DUTCH REPUBLICANISM

The construction of this Dutch republican perspective on Europe did

not come about as the result of a conscious process, nor did it depend
upon the arrogance of uncontested success or the establishment of a
new orthodoxy. It was rather the outcome of particular circumstances,
of a particular cultural climate, of party conflict, and of philosophical achievements. The ideology of Dutch republicanism came into being through the channels of dissent and criticism. Its essentially contested
nature made it no less central to Dutch politics, nor less influential abroad.
Without this republicanism, William III might never have joined forces
with Jewish bankers and English dissenters and set sail for England.6
Bernard Mandeville might never have been persuaded that paradox lay
at the basis of all social relations. The Scots, in particular Adam Smith,
5

Pieter de la Court, True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and
West-Friesland: Written by John de Witt and Other Great Men in Holland (London:
1702). This is a translation of Aanwysing der heilsame politike gronden en maximen van
de republike van Holland en West-Vriesland (Leiden/Rotterdam: Hakkens, 1669), 258,
259, 262, 375.
See D. J. Roorda, Rond Prins en patriciaat. Verspreide opstellen (Weesp: Fibula, 1984),
172ff.

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H ANS W. B LOM

might never have devised a theory of moral sentiments to complement

the Grotian natural system of liberty.7 French philosophical dissent
from Stouppe, Fontenelle, and Vauvenargues to Diderotwas greatly influenced by Spinoza and the republicanism associated with him.8 Similarly, the roots of German idealism are to be found in Spinoza and in the
Spinozan Platonist Francois Hemsterhuis.9 The republicanism behind
these influences may not always be straightforwardly political. A more
generous interpretation of republicanism, however, will help in understanding the commerce of Dutch ideas in the making of a broadly
European political culture.
The creation of the Dutch Republic has been dated to 1579, the year
when the defense union of the United Provinces against Spain was
concluded in the city of Utrecht, or to 1609, the year when the Spanish
Crown accepted a truce with its rebels (the Twelve Years Truce), or to
1648, the year of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia which finally ended all
conflict between the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Low Countries. The first
of these years1579would seem to be the most appropriate, if only
because it gave rise to the growing political self-consciousness apparent
in the works of Dirck Coornhert, Grotius, and many lesser figures of the
early years of the seventeenth century. The period after Westphalia has
been called the republican era, and it, too, produced outstanding political thinkers, among them John de Witt, Pieter de la Court, and Spinoza.
It was in these years that William III, prince of Orange, successfully reclaimed the Stadhoudership after the French invasion of 16724 and went
on to become king of England in 16889. In many respects the eighteenth
century witnessed a consolidation of republicanism and its general acceptance by society.10 The Batavian revolution of 1787 was a prelude to
the 1795 proclamation of the Batavian Republic. The aftermath of that
republic in the years between 1795 and 1814 led to the conviction that a
7

10

On Mandeville, see Douglas Den Uyl, Passion, State, and Progress: Spinoza and
Mandeville on the Nature of Human Association, Journal for the History of Ideas
14 (1987): 48198; Hans W. Blom, The Dutch Ideology of Consumption (Paper presented at a conference on The Consumption of Culture/The Culture of Consumption,
Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw, Rotterdam 2021 November 1997).
See, for example, Memoires de Jean de Witt, grand pensionnaire de Hollande. The Hague,
1709 (translation of de la Courts Aanwysing); A. Ch. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650
1729. II: Naturalism and Disbelief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Rudiger
Otto, Studien zur Spinozarezeption in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert

(Frankfurt am Main: Konigshausen

& Neumann, 1994); Winfried Schroder,
Spinoza

in der deutschen Fruhaufkl

arung
(Wurzburg:
Konigshausen
& Neumann, 1987).
See Hans Blom, The Republics Nation: Republicanism and Nationalism in the Dutch
Eighteenth Century (paper presented at The Eighteenth Century Conference, Dublin,
July 1999).

The Republican Mirror

97

constitutional monarchy fitted best with the Dutch republican tradition.

And in that sense the Netherlands remains a republic to this day.11
The political institutions of the United Provinces were complex and remained virtually unchanged during the two centuries of their existence.12
The defense federation created to secure independence from Spain had
conceded a considerable measure of autonomy to the cities and provinces.
The States General, on the other hand, and in particular the pensionary of
Holland, who acted as secretary-general to the States General, obtained
a major policy influence in foreign affairs and commercial policy. As the
prime nobleman of Holland, the Stadhouder, appointed by the States of
each province, held an eminent position in the States General. Only members of the House of Orange have been the Stadhouder, a function they
generally combined with that of captain-general of the army. The navy
was led by professional admirals, supervised by commissioners of the
States General. In addition, the admiralties, the chartered companies, and
the Water Boards were important and largely independent public organizations with special jurisdictions and the right to levy taxes. Historians
have often remarked that the Republic lacked an adequate concept of
sovereignty. In doing so, they overlook the republican value of the dispersion of sovereignty that necessarily accompanied this polyarchy. It thus
seems inadequate to label the Republic a federal state, if only because it
possessed no detailed regulation of the respective rights and duties of its
different parts.13
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the terms
liberty and republic were highly contested concepts.14 From the early
years of the Revolt (15681648) to the final Patriot debates of the last
decades of the eighteenth century, they functioned as the foci of discussion rather than as a source of agreed principles. The debates over the
nature of the free republic nicely illustrate the contested character of
liberty and republic as well as the evolving republican discourse. The
first debate developed between 1610 and the early 1620s at almost the
same time as the Twelve Years Truce (160921) in the eighty-year-long
struggle with Hapsburg Spain, and it took the form of a conflict over
the practicalities of religious tolerance. This conflict between Arminians
11
12
13
14

For this history see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall,
14771806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
See J. L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics
of Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
See Blom, Causality and Morality, ch. 2.
See, for example, Henry Mechoulan, Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza: Argent et liberte
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990).

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H ANS W. B LOM

and Gomarists apparently centered on the issue of predestination, but the

burgeoning aristocratic republicanism of politicians like Grotius was also
at stake. The conflict resulted finally in the defeat of the Grotian faction
and thus paved the way not only for Grotiuss epochal De iure belli ac
pacis, but, more importantly at the time, it forced the intellectual elite
to come to a common ideological understanding of the issues of human
nature and the nature of politics. As a consequence, in the 1620s a Neostoic
Aristotelianism and the mixed constitution became the dominant republican model.
The second debate took shape in the years around 1650, accompanying
first the preparation and conclusion of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
and the subsequent execution of Charles I and the early death of William
II of Orange in 1650. The publication in 1651 of the young Lambertus van
Velthuysens defense of Hobbess De Cive was, in a sense, its apogee and
marked the advent of a new phase in the republican debate. Still haunted
by what many regarded as the triumph of Calvinist orthodoxy in the final
years of the truce, the republicans made a new attempt to articulate the
relationship between the moral and the political, between the people and
their rulers. Here, the intellectual achievements of the 1620s were put to a
more radical use, in particular in the interpretations of Grotiuss De iure
belli.
Whereas Grotius had discussed the nature of international politics in
terms of perfect rights, van Velthuysen wanted to show how to deal with
imperfect rights in morality and politics. Unusually for a defendant of
Hobbes, van Velthuysen stressed the fact that morality admits of degrees
and yet in all its imperfection constitutes the basis for any form of sociability. Moreover, it was precisely in his understanding of an historically
evolving sociability that van Velthuysen found an essential point of reference for political rule. Thus, it was van Velthuysen who set the agenda
for the republican version of the great debate between the Grotian and
Hobbesian understanding of sociability, which today is better known in
the terms set by Samuel Pufendorf and his followers.15 This move toward
a concept of sociability acquired political momentum with the rise of a
bourgeois reason of state, that is, of a realist view of republics based
on self-interest.
The third debate was set off by the publications of Pieter and Johan
de la Court from 1660 onwards and culminated in Spinozas Tractatus
Theologico-politicus (1670) and Tractatus Politicus (1677). This was the
15

For a discussion of van Velthuysen, see Blom, Causality and Morality, chs. 4 and 5.

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99

closest that the republican debate came to being rephrased in commercial

terms, de la Court taking commerce to mean economic exchange, and
Spinoza, something closer to moral communicability. In many respects
Spinoza and de la Court were pursuing much the same argument within
the republican debate. On the issue of commerce, however, they parted
company. They both accepted wholeheartedly the evolutionary perspective on morality, but their ensuing conceptions of enlightened self-interest
differed. Although neither of them would endorse laws against luxury, de
la Court believed that the individual, while eschewing bankruptcy, is free
to enjoy his private indulgences; Spinoza, on the other hand, reckoned
luxury a failure of understanding. Although Spinoza was convinced that
laws cannot prevent luxury, he sincerely believed that the rational man
would endeavor to be useful to his fellowman and attempt to articulate
a common moral ground. Bernard Mandeville, for his part, attempted
to bring together the two approaches: he demanded that a Golden Age
must be as free for acorns as for honesty.16 It is one of the merits of
this republican discourse that it found the means to keep the space for
disagreement open and to allow a continuing debate on the distinctions
between the public-private and moral-political/economic. This flexibility
was to be an important rhetorical factor in the evolution of the linkage
conception of European politics.
THE FAILURES OF HUMANIST, ARISTOCRATIC
REPUBLICANISM, 160929

The Leiden philosopher Franco Burgersdijk was well known for his compendia of Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, and moral and political
thought.17 In 1623 he asked his student-readers whether it was reasonable to hope for a universal and eternal peace in this world.18 The answer
was straightforward. We may hope for eternal peace because this follows
from Holy Scripture, human reason and the consensus of all the wise.
The means to achieve this eternal peace is what Burgersdijk calls the
16
17

18

Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turnd Honest (London: Sam.
Ballard, 1705).
Moti Feingold, The Ultimate Pedagogue: Franco Petri Burgersdijk and the English
Speaking Academic Learning, in Franco Burgersdijk (15901635): Neo-aristotelianism
in Leiden, ed. E. P. Bos and H. A. Krop, vol. 1 of Studies in the History of Ideas in the
Low Countries (Amsterdam/Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1993), 15165.
Franco Burgersdijk, Idea oeconomicae et politicae doctrinae, 2d ed. (Leiden: H. de
Vogel, 1644); ed. G. Hornius: Idea politica cum annotationibus Georgi Horni, 2d ed.
(Leiden: Felix Lopez de Haro), 1668.

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H ANS W. B LOM

Imperium Oecumenicum (the Empire of the World). An essential attribute

of this universal governmentand the only one discussed by Burgersdijk
is religious peace:
The instruments of this religious peace are twofold: the conversion of the infidels,
whereby Paganism, Judaism and Mohammedanism will come to an end; and the
reconciliation of the believers (as we call all those who have been baptised and
recognise Christ as God and Redeemer). The Roman Catholics and the Evangelicals can be easily reconciled if only this pretended first bishop or vicariatus of
Christ be dismissed, and if, secondly, instead of the Council of Trent the Word of
God be established as norm and judge in Religion.19

Since Lutheran and Calvinist Protestants only disagree on obscure

matters, which neither really understand, the only thing required to bring
about Imperium Oecumenicum is that the kings from the south of the
German Empire agree with the Prince-Electors to banish all mutual
invectives and religious partisanship. The Universal religion is, thus, the
Christian one. The most interesting element of this diatribe is what is
not said, or said only implicitly. A universal Christian religion, by implication, cannot be allowed to suffer from intertribal conflicts among the
Reformed communities themselves. Both Burgersdijks church politics and
his conception of politics at large aimed at conciliation and consensus.
The obscurities, such as those about predestination, which had been a
source of such conflict only a few years previously, must be subordinated
to the more important issues of Christian reconciliation. Moreover, it is
the duty of sovereigns to put an end to such conflicts.
Burgersdijks strictures on the Pope follow the arguments against collateralism: there cannot be two authorities in religious affairs. The sovereign
alone wields the sword, although he should always seek the advice of the
ministers, and religious differences should be respected.20 The sovereign
may have religious convictions different from those of his subjects, something which does not prevent him from being a legitimate prince, let alone
make him a tyrant. Consciences should not be forced. Blasphemers, perjurers, impostors, and demagogures, however, should be contained, insofar
as they intend to seduce others and destroy the peace of the church.
Toleration in religion is complemented by consensus in politics.
Burgersdijk endorsed the order of mixed government for the United Provinces, as in accordance with the freedom and the interests of the citizens.21
Tolerance and consensusunity in diversitycan be guaranteed only if
19
21

20 Ibid., 187.
Burgersdijk, Idea oeconomicae, 228.
Ibid., 20925: Superest status ex Monarchia, Aristocratia & Democratia temperatus.
Hic status videtur omnium tutissimus, quia duae reliquae formae, tertiam impediunt, ne
possit Remp. turbare (21819).

The Republican Mirror

101

sectarian interests do not claim exclusive prerogatives in the state.

Burgersdijk did not, perhaps, really believe in the efficacy of his provisions, and rightly so. Religious conflicts were to remain a feature of the
Dutch Republic for the rest of its existence, as was to be expected from
a federal republic that sought tolerance and consensus at the same time.
The ongoing debates on religious politics continued to stress the practical
dimensions of tolerance, stopping only at the final destruction of the political order and of its ability to operate effectively. Burgersdijk was right,
moreover, in stressing that this balancing act required self-restraint among
believers, theologians and philosophers alike, and responsible government
to go with it.
The loud tone of appeasement in Burgersdijk must be heard amid the
intense debate that almost tore apart the young Republic during the 1610s.
Grotius, whose participation in the debates earned him a sentence of life
imprisonment in 1620, had been ideologically and politically involved.
He wrote several tracts in which he defended the political line taken by
Johan Oldenbarneveldt, the pensionary of the States of Holland. Grotius
espoused this line in the Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas of
1613 and took part in the debate between the Arminian Conrad Vorstius
and the Gomarist Sybrand Lubbertus in order to defend the majestas of
the sovereign powers.22
Central to Grotiuss argument was the ability of secular authorities to
judge in religious matters. Grotius rejected the idea that the community
of ordinary believers could be a better judge than the outstanding regenten who ruled the country.23 He reinforced this laudatio of the wise and
pious regenten by exhibiting his own competence in theology. Reviewing the history of Christianity since the earliest times, he attempted to
demonstrate that the secular authorities have always executed the highest
authority in religious matters. This argument was directed at King James
and the theologians in England, who had been invoked by Lubbertus
and his friends. According to Grotiuss reading of history, political authorities have always convened, directed, and concluded church councils, because they have appointed bishops, priests, or ministers. Grotius
22
23

Sybrandus Lubbertus, Declaratio responsionis D. Conradi Vorstii (Franeker: A. Radaeus,

1611).
Hugo Grotius, Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas, ed. and trans. E. Rabbie: The
Hague: E. J. Brill, 1995 (1st ed.: Leiden: Ioannes Patius, 1613), p. 7 (111): the States of
Holland . . . the supreme rulers of a nation most noble from time immemorial, who have
opposed a doubly unjust rule, by the Spaniards and the Romanists, with great courage and
firmness. . . . Outstanding nobility holds a seat in this assembly, the legitimate offspring
of excellent parents, who rescued the exercise of the true religion at the risk of their lives
and at the loss of their fatherland and their fortune.

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H ANS W. B LOM

suspected Lubbertus of being a Puritan since he claimed the right to convene councils and to appoint ministers for the community of believers.
He did not deny individual church members their right to private convictions. But the public church was the responsibility of the authorities,
and if they abandoned their jurisdiction in this respect, the unity of the
country would be lost.
The political leaders of Holland and therefore of the States General
the pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, and Grotius himselftried to
soothe the turmoil by a policy of toleration, which for various reasons
tended in practice to support one of the contending parties. The Remonstrants, whose opinions on grace and predestination were less severe than
those of their opponents, the Contraremonstrants, claimed priority in the
public church on the basis of this tolerance. With the help of Grotius and
his party, they gained control of many towns, thereby enraging their opponents still further. Many believed the regenten were working against the
real principles of Calvinism. An opposition coalition developed outside of
Holland, as well as in towns within Holland that had reason to mistrust
the policies of Oldenbarnevelt. In some places regenten were confronted
by orthodox ministers and their followers, attempting to regain their former positions within the public church; in others regenten and orthodox
believers made common cause against regenten elsewhere. Things took a
dramatic turn when Prince Maurits, the Stadhouder, ostentatiously visited
the Contraremonstrant church in The Hague.24
As the main architect and executive of the strategy of Oldenbarnevelt,
Grotius apparently combined a sincere belief in tolerance with an equally
strong belief in power politics. His fundamental conviction was that as
long as the regenten in the towns and the provinces retained their rightful
autonomy, a religious conflict could be prevented. Hence, all his activities were directed at increasing the power of the towns by local militia,
and that of the provinces by claiming their right to resolve the conflict
through the provincial synods. Prince Maurits replied by supporting the
Contraremonstrants and by creating a National Synod of the Reformed Church to overcome the stronghold in Holland.25 This, together
24

25

See H. A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid. Een verhandeling over de verhouding
van kerk en staat in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en de vrijheid van meningsuiting in zake godsdienst, drukpers en onderwijs, gedurende de 17e eeuw (Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, 1972); H. C. Rogge, Johannes Wtenbogaert en zijn tijd, 3 vols.
(Amsterdam: Y. Rogge, 18746); Jan den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, 5 vols. (Haarlem: Tjeenk
Willenk, 196072).
See A. Th. van Deursen, Oldenbarnevelt en Maurits, in De Hollandse jaren van Hugo
de Groot, 15831621, ed. by H. Nellen and C. Ridderikhof (Amsterdam: Verloren,
1996), 55160.

The Republican Mirror

103

with Mauritss superior military forces, was to prove to be Grotiuss

undoing.
Mauritss successful coup detat put a (temporary) end to the privileged position of the Arminians and forced Grotius not only to defend
himself in court, but also to justify extensively his actions in writing. He
was to write two books on the subject: the Apology of 1622 and the
posthumously published De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra
(1647). Moreover, he made extensive notes, rediscovered and published
in the nineteenth century.26 Taken together, these writings offer a forceful
picture of Grotiuss conception of the existing form of government. His
core argument was that the States General (manipulated by Prince Maurits) had had no right to arraign him in the first place and had thereby
disregarded the rights of the States of Holland, his lawful sovereign. He
claimed to be a loyal citizen of those States.
All these events made me reflect, he wrote,
whether some advised His Excellency [Prince Maurits] to bide his time and execute
his old aspirations, or in fact following the example of Philippus of Macedonia
(who under pretext of the defence of religion conquered one part of Greece by
the other) and of Augustus in Rome, both of whom placating the people by
taking the name of captain-general and keeping the appearance of the old form
of government, usurped all power; likewise it happened in Florence when the
Medici simulated the defence of the common people against the rulers. I for my
part have considered that the aristocratic government which has been obtained
by so much expense and blood, with Gods remarkable blessing, ought not to be
changed into a monarchy, that although at first well governed, would probably
befall worse rulers, as has been experienced in Rome and elsewhere. While I
considered all changes for the worse (to the point that I advised the pensionary
against the public discussion of this matter), I feared most of all a change produced
by popular commotion.27

Grotius had played for high stakes, and he had lost. Between the security offered by the long arms of King James, and the implacability of the
heretic hunters, Grotius had attempted to articulate and enforce a church
order for a Protestant republic. Crucial to this model was the responsibility of the ruling elite for the proper functioning of religion in society. The
combination of Erastianism and aristocratic leadership forced tolerance
within the confines of the principles of republican sovereignty. As Spinoza
would later point out, the only solution in an aristocracy is to let the
26

27

Hugo Grotius, Memorie van mijne intentien en notabele bejegeningen, manuscript written in 1621; Ed. R. Fruin: Verhooren en andere bescheiden betreffende het rechtsgeding
van Hugo de Groot (Utrecht: Kemink, 1871), 180.
Grotius, Memorie van mijne intentien, 1112.

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H ANS W. B LOM

regenten be the leaders of the public church, as wardens and as ministers,

while tolerating other sects as private denominations outside the public
realm. As Spinoza also pointed out, however, an aristocracy is a weak
form of state, and its rulers live in permanent fear of the disenfranchised
popular masses.28
The outcome of Grotiuss quest for an alliance between church and state
was thus the failure of classical, aristocratic republicanism. In the end it
proved impossible to eradicate the puritan tendencies that had plagued
Flanders in the sixteenth century29 and now the northern Netherlands
as well. Later two responses were attempted. The first was to articulate a theory of sovereignty that did not hinge on the civic virtues of
the regenten.30 This was a notion of absolute sovereignty, supported by
Pauline perspectives on authority, of the kind to be found in Grotiuss De
iure belli ac pacis and in his friend Dirk Graswinckels De iure majestatis.31
The second response was to find a better understanding of the relationship between the rulers and the masses than that available in the
simple Lipsian dictum that rulers have to rule and subjects have to
obey.32

THE MORAL CONTAINMENT OF REASON OF STATE

In 1641 Corvinus edited the De arcanis of Clapmarius, and in a long

preface he explained the simulacra imperii seu libertatis, the shadows
of rule or liberty.33 This was sufficiently popular to be reprinted in 1644.
It would, however, be wrong to see this success as a clear indication of
the Dutch acceptance of reason of state in full. Lipsius before him had
explained prudentia mixta as actions to some honorable end, mixed with
an element of deceit, and emphasized the well-being of the people as the
honorable end of any ruler.34 Clapmarius argued fully in this line in his
28
29
31

32
33

34

Tractatus Politicus [Amsterdam, 1677], chs. 8 and 9.

30 Elaborating on Pietas, 98 (175).
Pietas, 199 (237).
See Hans W. Blom, Les reactions hollandaises a` lexecution de Charles I: Monarchie
et republique dans les Provinces-Unies apr`es 1649, in Monarchie et republique, ed.
V. C. Zarka (Paris: Vrin, in print).
See Justus Lipsius, Politicorum libri six (Leiden: F. Raphelengius, 1589), ch. 1.
De arcanis rerumpublicarum libri sex, illustrati a Joan. Corvinus I.C. Accessit v.d. Chr.
Besoldi de eadem materia discursus, nec non Arnoldi Clapmarii et aliorum conclusiones
de jure publico (Amsterdam: L. Elzevir, 1641; 1644, 2d rev. ed.).
On Lipsius in particular, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 15721651
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Karl Enenkel and Chris Heesakkers,
eds., Lipsius in Leiden: Studies in the Life and Works of a Great Humanist (Voorthuizen:
Florivallis, 1997).

The Republican Mirror

105

interpretation of Senecas famous saying that necessity, this great fosterer

of human weakness, breaks any law.35 Corvinus approved of the first
part of the phrase and expressly embraced necessity as the protector of
the human deficit, patrocinium imbecillitatis humanae, but was less sure
about it being a legitimate ground for breaking the law. The Dutch, jealous
of their fundamental laws and privileges, would never go along with the
latter view, although they agreed with Clapmarius that it is this force
of necessity, this dignity, which often brings lawfulness and equity to an
illicit business.36
Corvinuss De arcanis should be seen as part of a larger set of writings, which included books by both Gerard van Wassenaer and Pieter
de la Court. A surprising fact about all three books on the arcana is
that their respective authors or editors, from Joannes Corvinus to Pieter
de la Court, had a shared political allegiance. Corvinus studied theology in Leiden and was a pupil of Arminius. As such he not only defended his master against his detractors, but also represented the
Remonstrants at the Synod of Dordt in 161819. For Corvinus, as for
many Remonstrants, this episode ended in exile. Not until 1632 did
he establish himself as a lawyer and sometime professor in law in
Amsterdam. The author of several books on law, he was highly thought
of by Grotius.37 Wassenaer (15891664), the Utrecht lawyer, lived with
a vivid memory of the coup detat of Prince Maurits. He lost his position in the Utrecht vroedschap after that event, never to return to his
seat again. Many of his friends were important Remonstrants. His son
studied under that arch-enemy of Dutch Calvinism, the Cartesian and
Utrecht professor of medicine, Henricus Regius. Pieter de la Court, as a
student in Leiden, was already heavily involved in the Cartesian movement. Partly through the agency of Grotiuss son Pieter, he sought the
protection of the States-party. He was a vehement opponent of orthodox
Calvinism.
Wassenaer published Arcana in Republics and Principalities in which
he combined Corvinuss Dutch version of reason of state with the modern
35

36

37

Necessitas magnum imbecillitatis humanae patrocinium, omnem legem frangit. This

phrase was coined by Justus Lipsius in his Politicorum libri sex (Leiden: Plantijn, 1589),
book 4, chap. 14, from M. A. Seneca (rhetor), Declamationum Excerpta, book 9,
ch. 4.
Et tunc necessitatis ea vis est, ea dignitas, ut saepe rei non licitae jus et aequum tribuat.

Cited by Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsrason

in der neueren Geschichte (Munchen:
Oldenbourg, 1924), 169.
Grotius refers to vetera nostra amicitia in a letter to Corvinus (7 January 1640;
Briefwisseling, XI, nr. 4458), while he praised his juridical talent in a letter to his son
Pieter (8 July 1639; Briefwisseling, X, nr. 4194).

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H ANS W. B LOM

psychology of his day.38 The result was an interesting handbook for strategies of bourgeois preferment in republics and monarchies alike. Pieter de
la Court pirated this text, when he republished it in 1660, under the different title Politieke consideratien.
Thus, the Dutch use of Clapmarius has a particular purpose: in revealing the hidden agenda of princes, it supports the exclusion of William III
from the office of Stadhouder of Holland in 1654 and explains the theoretical preconditions for a flourishing body politic. In dialogue with
Clapmarius, and hence with Tacitus and Machiavelli, these republicans
forged their weapons against Orangism. They showed the dismal consequences of the supposedly indispensable simulacra imperii. They sought
to achieve this end by demonstrating that only false reason of state reigns,
that flagitia (vice or baseness) and not true reason of state is the first principle of princely or monarchical rule. In other words, since false reason
of state promoted the private interest of the ruler to the detriment of the
public good, under princely rule it is the subject who suffers.
If Orangism was indeed their ideological target, how did the republicans expect to be able to exploit the reason-of-state tradition? The principal objective of that tradition was to demonstrate that true reason of state
is a real, and necessary, option. How can one argue successfully against
reason of state by attempting to demonstrate that history shows the
arcana to be a sure means for the defense of the public good? The more
prudent versions of the classical arguments against reason of state, such
as Lipsiuss, relied heavily on demonstrating precisely the immorality of
the arcana. To admit this, however, would be to go against the grain of
realism that all these authors wished to embrace. De la Court, for one,
was happy to point out the similarity between his own description of man
as selfish and vicious and the Calvinist notion of the sinfulness of man. It
is not a complacent moral attitude they sought to deploy against reason
of state. Rather they were looking for means to demolish monarchy (that
is, Orangism) by demolishing one of its theoretical foundations (that is,
reason of state) by taking it as a limiting case.
In the context of this strategy, the importance of Corvinus is beyond
doubt. The elaborate introduction to his edition of Clapmarius constitutes
a highly significant summary of De arcanis rerumpublicarum. Moreover,
Corvinus sets the tone for Wassenaer. He presents his topic as an ars
regnandi, the art of government, within the limits of trust, honesty, and
38

Gerard van Wassenaer, Bedekte Konsten in Regeringen en Heerschappien (Utrecht: van

Zyll and van Ackersdyck, 1657).

The Republican Mirror

107

virtue.39 His goal is the longevity and stability of the common weal. The
means to these ends are surely not in the open and following the main
route (via regia), but by means of hidden simulation.40 They follow on
the one hand definitely from the argument of necessity, which rather gives
than obeys the law, on the other hand even from public utility.41 They
should not, however, defy trust or social morality, fidem sive pudorem,
good faith or honor.
Although Corvinus summarizes the contents of De arcanis quite faithfully, on certain points heoffershis own arguments on theoretical and practical origins. Appropriately for a jurist, Corvinus endorses Clapmariuss
foundation of the arcana in the imperii & majestatis jura. If the latter are
in peril, the former should be used. For Corvinus the application of the
arcana has essentially to do with the redress of the process of decay of the
state. The doctrine of Clapmarius provides the reader with an analysis
or diagnosis of the morbi Reipublicae. The Prince of the Peripatetici
(Aristotle), says Corvinus, claimed that diagnosing an illness amounted
to identifying its cure. In the same vein, knowing the causes of the decay
of states is to know how to remedy it. Therefore, in Corvinuss opinion,
Aristotle, who was hostile to the arcana and considered them to be more
fraud than simple false prudence, regarded their use as appropriate in
totally disturbed states where one cannot follow the right procedure,
except at the risk of public injury.42 Corvinus advises the reader to judge
whether this argument is in agreement with Aristotle. The implication
is that the doctrine of arcana is there to be used against flagitia that
threaten the state performed by any of the parties of the body politic: the
prince, the aristocrats, or the people. In particular the people are to be
feared, but wisely Corvinus did not endorse the negative qualification by
Clapmarius (chap. V, 19) of leaders who are prepared to mobilize an
easily excitable mob.

The peace talks in Munster,

Westphalia (16467), provided a further
opportunity to develop this bourgeois reason of state. Bringing the war
with Spain to a close had been difficult, not only on the Spanish side,
39

40
41
42

Habet tamen ars simulandi suos limites; fidem, honestatem, virtutem; quos qui egreditur,
nae vafri & nefarii hominis potius, quam politici nomen videtur, Corvinus, Arcanis,
Introduction, 23.
non aperta quidem et via regia, sed per tacta simulacra, Ibid., 1.
tum quidem ex argumenta necessitatis, quae legem potius dat quam accipit . . . tum etiam
publicae utilitatis, Ibid., 26.
[Aristoteles] occultorum usum minus probat. Calliditatem iis inesse potius existimat,
quam veram prudentiam plane perperam, arcana to be used in very disturbed states
where non possis recta incedere via, nisi cum damno publico, Ibid., f2v.

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H ANS W. B LOM

but also in the Republic. Local interests (privateering from Zeeland) and
factional interests supported the general distrust of a world without war.
Hence the talks were accompanied by a noticeable outpouring of pamphlets arguing for and against the cessation of hostilities. Not surprisingly,
reason of state was prominent in these arguments. Princes, wrote the
author of the 1646 tract Hollandsche Sybille,
vow a solemn pledge to their subjects to protect their preservation, good and
wellbeing, with all the force, wit, and prudence. This is an iron tie that cannot
be disturbed or broken by another or a paper tie. Necessity breaks laws, said
Sybille. It would be better not to conclude treaties, but necessity often obliges
a prince to make them. The same necessity, however, sometimes forces him to
maintain them, and sometimes to break them. As long as the foundation and the
cause lasts on which the alliance was entered, so long will its maintenance last.43

Although in many of the Peace Talks tracts we find this awareness of

the amorality of international politicsdo not the big fish always eat the
small44 the critical role that the Dutch Republic should play in Europe
is stressed. Nevertheless, nothing is more useful for the preservation of
general peace, continued the author of the Hollandsche Sybille,
than the existence of republics, which can be the intermediaries and mediators
between the ambitious designs of kings and their favourites. . . . In Italy this duty
was often taken care of by Venice, which always prudentially kept the balance
between the powerful crowns, while never permitting either one or the other to
prevail. The Republic of the United Provinces likewise seems to have been elected
by God with the intention of preserving the political balance, to be mediators,
and to maintain equality and the equilibrium.45

In 1650 the internal use of this Dutch version of reason of state was directed against the prince of Orange. After the princes attempt at
Amsterdam, a pamphleteer wrote, I see now that you Hollanders butcher
the children, while they are given puppets to play with; you enjoy and
adorn yourself with the name of Free Hollanders, while your States are
forced by a young governor.46 This hyperbolic sentence combines a reference to both reason-of-state writing and actual Dutch politics. The
shadows of freedom are the illusions by which cynical princes rule;
43
44

45
46

Hollandsche Sybille (Amsterdam: Roelof Heyndrickz, 1646), 13.

Den on-geveynsden Nederlantschen Patriot met den argh-listigen geveynsden Franschman tsamen-sprekende op het stuck van den ghesloten vrede tussechen Spagnien ende
de Vereenighde Neder-landen (Alckmaer: Jan Claesz, 1647), 4.
Hollandsche Sybille, 28.
Hollants praatjen tusschen vier personen, een Gelderman, een Hollander, een Vries, en een
Brabander. Aangaande de souverainiteyt van Syn Hoogheyt, en tot justificatie van de Ed.
Mog. Heeren Staten van Hollandt, en de Achtbare Heeren Burgemeesters en Regeerders
der Stadt Amsterdam. Het eerste deel. (Antwerpen: Jeronimus Verdussen, 1650), Bv .

The Republican Mirror

109

they merely give the people puppets to play. Prince William II, the
young governor, is by implication presented as such a prince.
Clapmarius and Corvinus had maintained that the simulacra could not
change political relations, since the latter are founded on the iura imperii
alone. Yet Wassenaer discussed the theory from the point of view of the
art and ways to achieve political office and status. He emphasizes the
role of fortune and gives a realist analysis of politics in his dissection of
the passions. He stresses the importance of prudence as the middle way
between obstinacy and subservience. Politeness and civility, prognostic
reasoning and artful skill, patience, humility, courage, and experience are
the prerequisites of successful political behavior. In order efficaciously to
control his emotions, the politician should cultivate the virtues of magnanimity, strength, and caution.47 But necessity, he wrote,
should be understood above anything else, and we should try to overcome, in
every way available, with power and force, whatever opposes us, and cannot be
avoided, in the pursuit of our intentions; but first we should consider the value
and importance of the end we are aiming at, and that forces upon us this necessity,
and we should compare its outcome with the labour and costs we will have to
suffer in order to obtain the necessary means. Because if the losses are greater than
the advantages that we can expect, it would be better to attempt something else.
One has (also) to consider whether there are different means that lead to this end.
From these one should choose first the most secure, then the most easy, and lastly
the less indecent. Since necessity has no law, and the end is honest, the means used
to obtain an honest end will be overlooked and excused, although they may not
have been very honest.48

Gerard van Wassenaers bourgeois courtier tries to understand his own

and others passions, prepares for the adversity of fortune, is cautious
about his reputation, aims at moderation, but most of all calculates his
chances to further his own interests. Although Wassenaer agreed with
Clapmarius in his criticism of Machiavelli (chap. V, 1), who is said to
have believed that princes should sin as much as possible, he is rather
elusive about the justification of ends. Wassenaer is convinced that people
are more prone to indignation and outrage than they are to doing good.
In effect, Wassenaer is saying here that there is no objective definition
of the good. Violent passions are to be subdued because of their socially
47

48

Hollandsche Sybille, 168: Furthermore, to arrange our movements [of the soul] in good
order, there is caution, of which the foremost effect is to take away all causes and circumstances that could produce in us intemperate movements, since it is easier to cast these
off, than once introduced to command them; next we survey all good and bad things
that in the pursuit of a matter can possibly happen. As is evident from this quotation,
the Dutch neo-stoic does not shun from introducing Aristotelian elements as well.
Ibid., 1901.

H ANS W. B LOM

110

adverse consequences only, moderation is to be the rule, risk-aversion is

to be considered the wisest option in this uncertain world. Wassenaer
refers his readers, if they want to understand the good, to the common
sentiment (t gemeen gevoelen) instead of to the teachers of wisdom.
Pieter de la Courts contribution to the discourse of republicanism must
be understood against this background. Adorned with a repertoire of
Tacitean learning, his works attempted to provide a realistic moral psychology as the basis for an objective definition of the good. Since he is best
known for the one book that was translated into English and French, the
Aanwysing (1669), a revised edition of the Interest van Holland, there
is a tendency to regard de la Court as primarily a student of international
relations. These publications went under the name of John de Witt, and
they were widely regarded as the theoretical foundation of de Witts and
accordingly of Dutch foreign policy. Because of this it is easy to overlook
the fact that the reason-of-state literature became a very powerful argument in the republican debates in the middle of the seventeenth century.
The literature aimed at some sort of reintroduction of the people into
the workings of the body politic.

THE CULMINATION OF THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE

The core of Pieter de la Courts thought is thus embedded within a particular realist view of politics entrenched in Dutch political debate. In his
well-known claim
the interest of every country consists in the well-being of its rulers and subjects
together, and it is dependent on a good form of government, and therefore that is
the foundation on which the well-being of the commonwealth is built; so one has
to understand, that a good form of government is not where the well- or ill-being
of the subjects depends on the virtue or vice of the rulers, but (and this should be
noted) where the well- and ill-being of the rulers, by necessity follows from, or
depends on, the well- or ill-being of the subjects.49

Interest is well-being, as yet undefined, but structurally conditioned by the

interconnection, or interdependence, of the interests of rulers and subjects.
But what safeguards these interests? In effect, nothing. Fundamentally,
interests are a species of passions, but not all passions can qualify as
interests: they must conform to the formula of interdependence of the
well-being of citizens and rulers alike.
49

Aanwysing, 2.

The Republican Mirror

111

These attempts to articulate a republican theory in terms of self-interest

did not, of course, go uncontested. Most of the arguments directed against
the Interest of Holland are all too familiar. Some, however, did attempt
to meet de la Court on his own ground. The anonymous author of
Den herstelden Prins (The Prince Restored) set out to prove that a Stadhouder is in the interest of the United Provinces, mainly because the same
self-interest, the desire for respect and reputation, that drives the regenten to contribute to the welfare of the state operates also for the
Stadhouder. Just as regenten are recruited from well-established families, so, too, are the Stadhouders. There is no disagreement here over
human nature. In the well-ordered republic of the United Provinces, so
de la Court argues, there are ample means to keep the Stadhouder within
his legitimate bounds. And thus he is an outstanding instrument to develop the role of the Republic as the balancer of power within the new
Europe.
Spinoza took much the same line. Contracts between states, he argued,
will remain in force as long as [their] basisnamely, the consideration
of danger or advantagepersists.50 For a ruler cannot keep whatever
promise he sees likely to be detrimental to his country without violating
his pledge to his subjects, a pledge by which he is most firmly bound,
and whose fulfilment usually involves the most solemn pledges.51 The
big fishes still eat the little ones, but they do so now by natural right.52
Tolerance is a matter of political convenience, as it was for de la Court.
So however much sovereigns are believed to possess unlimited right and
to be the interpreters of law and piety, Spinoza wrote,
they will never succeed in preventing men from exercising their own particular
judgment on any matter whatsoever. . . . Indeed, since they cannot so act without
endangering the whole fabric of the state, we can even argue that they do not have
the absolute right to do so. For we have demonstrated that the right of sovereigns
is determined by their power.53

For those who regard Spinoza primarily as a follower of Hobbes, this

might seem an unexpected move. But it is not. For Spinoza, the participant
in the discussions over the state of Holland is one for whom the concept
of sovereignty had ceded pride of place to the problems of the functional
50
51
53

Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, ed. B. S. Gregory and trans. S. Shirley (Leiden:

E. J. Brill, 1989), ch. 16, 244.
52 Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 245.
Ibid., 292; the proof of the identity of might and right is in chapter 16.

112

H ANS W. B LOM

processes in politics.54 In his Tractatus Politicus, Spinoza pursues precisely

this line of argument. First of all, he tries to sort out the puzzles of the republic. As he follows de la Court in his description of the aristocratic form
of government, he is very close to de la Courts argument about the government of states and Stadhouder in his presentation of what we would now
call constitutional monarchy. In discussing the latter, he is mainly concerned with the various councils that advise the monarch, and he endorses
the opinion of de la Court that in a well-ordered state a monarch is tied
by his self-interest to the well-being of the state. In this way the differences between the various forms of government are gradually erased. The
essential characteristic of a well-ordered state is the coordination of the
interests of the rulers and the ruled. In the Republic men of every race
and sect live in complete harmony; and before entrusting their property to
some person they will want to know no more than this, whether he is rich
or poor and whether he has been honest or dishonest in his dealings.55
EUROPEAN REPUBLICANISM AND THE REPUBLICAN
IDEA OF EUROPE

The distinction between national and international politics becomes a

gradual one. In particular, the private interests of citizens balance and
counteract the interests of states and suggest the argument for the special
position of republics in keeping the balance of power in Europe. This
aspect of Dutch republicanism has been disregarded in Dutch historiography. The interpretations of Nicolette Mout, van de Klashorst, E. H.
Kossmann, Haitsma Mulier, and van Gelderen are striking in their inwardness. None of them refers to the fact that the major political debates
originated in the context of international warfare. Their entire emphasis
is on faction and on the ephemeral manifestations of what this chapter
claims was the core of the republican debate in the United Provinces
namely, how to articulate the aims of policies within a system that is open
to the rest of Europe, commercially as well as militarily.
I have presented here an alternative republicanism, one that tried to
distinguish between what divided the two factions (the position of the
54

55

The centrality of Spinoza to Dutch political thought can best be seen from the fact that his
political views were hardly contested. He was evidently suspected of being a partisan of
John de Witt. But criticism was directed against his theological position. In other words,
Spinoza underestimated, just as Grotius had done half a century earlier, the wrath of
the theologians when outsiders and laymen meddle in their pristine science.
Ibid., 298.

The Republican Mirror

113

prince of Orange) and what united them (an interest-based conception

of politics). This latter aspect, as it was developed over the seventeenth
century, made possible a commercial republicanism and linked welfarism and international peace. Dutch republicanism contributed to an
idea of Europe that focused on the wealth of nations and the continuity
of exchange or commerce beyond the nation-state.
The fear for peace that Grotius said in 1607 was conducive to the loss
of civic (that is, martial) spirit and to the rise of faction had been replaced,
in the course of the seventeenth century, by an equally principled quest
for peace as the necessary condition for the well-being of the people. In
this way Dutch republicanism diverged from that of its European counterparts. But its program was raised to an international level by other
means.
In 1720 a book attributed to B.M. was published in London with the
title Free Thoughts on Religions, the Church and National Happiness.56 In
every respect this was a republican tract, very much like the ones we have
been discussing. Its Dutch origin is evident from its discussion of religion
and the role of the church and from its laudatory account of William of
Oranges role in establishing liberty and good government in England. In
other respects as well, the text has a strongly Dutch flavor. My aim,
declares the author, is to make men penetrate their own consciences,
and, by searching without flattery into their true motives, learn to know
themselves. This objective he then applies to politics.
I have often heard well-meaning people say, that would every body be honest,
ours is the best constitution in the world. But this is no encomium, where every
body will be honest and do their duty all government are good alike. That is the
best constitution which provides against the worst contingencies, that is armed
against knavery, treachery, deceit, and all the wicked wiles of human cunning and
preserves itself firm and unshaken, though most men should prove knaves. It is
with a national constitution, as it is with that of mens bodies: that which can bear
most fatigues without being disorderd and last the longest in health is the best.57

The author goes on to claim that a very considerable part of the

sovereignty remains virtually in the people. For that reason a prince
of wisdom and penetration, considering that he has almost every subject
to fear, and none he can really trust, should for his own sake be willing
to desist from this right of absolute sway, and share the supreme power
56
57

Bernard Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness
(London: T. Jauncy, 1720).
Ibid., 297.

114

H ANS W. B LOM

with his people.58 Indeed, whoever would be happy should endeavour

to be wise. . . . There is no better way of curing groundless jealousy and
pannick fears, than by daring to examine and boldly look into the face
of things.59 On these grounds, it is wrong to expect virtue from either
statesmen or courtiers, and it will always be better to rely upon laws and
legislation as curbs to human behavior than on all the virtues ministers
can be possessd of. Discussion of the moral qualities of a statesman
becomes merely a partisan affair. A whole set of statesmen of different
tempers and capacities, virtues and vices are extolld to the skies in one
company, in another they are damnd to the pit of hell, and as often as
these great men change sides, so often shall those companies change their
language.60 High politics is always unlike what ordinary people imagine
it to be:
He who knows how courtiers throw their own faults upon others; their artifices
in spreading reports; the fastening of slander; the mines they dig for one anothers
destruction; the deep craft of their intrigues; and all the other machinations in
practice among them, will have but little faith in what is rumourd about publick
ministers.61

From what has been said, it might be apparent that the author of Free
Thoughts on Religions, the Church and National Happiness was Bernard
Mandeville. By 1720 he had come a long way from his youthful involvement with factional conflict, which in the early 1690s had forced him to
flee his native Rotterdam and settle in London.62 As a critic of English
grumbling, he achieved a notoriety he would probably never have attained if the regenten of Rotterdam had exercised some of the public virtue
that Mandeville later came to realize he should never have expected of
them. In England, in the midst of so much ease, and greater plenty than
any empire, state or kingdom now enjoys, Mandeville applied essentially Dutch republican principles to the explanation of man and society.63
And unlike those of his great predecessor, Spinoza, Mandevilles writings
would have a continuous impact on political thought throughout the eighteenth century. When later Adam Smith set out his republican program for
the enhancing wealth of nations, and Jeremy Bentham argued that nature
had given mankind two sovereign masterspleasure and painthey
58
60
62
63

59 Ibid., 335.
Ibid., 303, 307.
61 Ibid., 341.
Ibid., 343.
See Rudolf Dekker, Private Vices, Public Benefits Revisited: The Dutch Background of
Bernard Mandeville, in History of European Ideas 14 (1992): 48198.
Mandeville, Free Thoughts, 334.

The Republican Mirror

115

became the true heirs to this originally Dutch commercial republicanism. It is a program that still reverberates through all the political and
economic moves toward greater European union, a union that is likely to
be the only effective means of undoing the nineteenth-century fiction of
national sovereignty and of making governments more responsive to the
needs and demands of their citizens.64
Montesquieu, it would seem, had been attacking the wrong kind of
republic. Quentin Skinners liberty before liberalism seems to misdirect his argument in a comparable manner, although here the opposition is between classical republicanism and the new liberty apparent in
seventeenth-century England.65 Philip Pettit, on the other hand, has correctly interpreted the program of Dutch republicanism as the institutional
organization of the liberty a citizen has if he is to safeguard himself against
the domination of others.66 This modern articulation of the core of Dutch
republicanism, emphasizing tolerance and freedom from domination as
well as the prerequisite of viable, self-sustaining institutions, might well
provide the link between this early-modern anomaly and the future of
Europe.
The Dutch Republic had mirrored itself in the reason-of-state politics of
the surrounding monarchies and produced a modern, realist, bourgeois,
and republican theory of politics. This new model reflected upon political thinkers like Algernon Sidney and the earl of Shaftesbury in England
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. At the better moments of Dutch
history, the Dutch perspective asserted itself on the forum of European
politics. Even today, when talk of a federalist reformation of the European Union is being heard, the seventeenth-century Republic of the Seven
United Provinces is a model to look to.
64

65
66

It is precisely its disregard for the place of the republican tradition in the formation of
the modern European state system that makes S. F. Finers posthumous magnum opus
so unsatisfactory. See his ad hominem attack on J. G. A. Pocock, The History of
Government. I: Ancient Monarchies and Empires. II: The Intermediate Ages. III: Empires, Monarchies and the Modern State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1021.
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).

5
The Napoleonic Empire and the
Europe of Nations
BIANCAMARIA FONTANA

Or che regna fra le genti

La piu` placida armonia,
DellEuropa sempre fia
Il destin felice appien

In 1824 the Italian musician Gioacchino Rossini, who was at the time at
the height of his reputation, living in golden retirement in Paris, was commissioned to write an opera celebrating the coronation of King Charles
X, the former Comte dArtois, youngest brother of the unfortunate Louis
XVI. Rossini obliged: the opera was called Il Viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Reims); it was performed a few timesapparently with successin
the presence of the royal family, but then, judging it unsuitable for ordinary theatrical repertoire, the author withdrew it, using the score for his
popular opera buffa Le Comte Ory.
The plot of Il Viaggio a Reims is quite thin: a group of travelers of
different nationalities, on their way to Reims to assist in the ceremony of
the coronation, meet in the spa town of Plombi`eres; marooned in a local
auberge by a series of mishaps and unable to pursue their journey, they
decide to celebrate the event on the spot with a banquet and a musical
performance. Each character in the opera impersonates rather comically
a national stereotype: a French countess is a fashion-mad flirt, a Spanish
nobleman clicks his heels and breaks into flamencos, a German baron
is called Trombonok and appears on stage with the accompaniment of
a military brass band, and so on. To emphasize these cultural diversities, the score incorporates appealingly the tunes of national anthems and
traditional folk songs.
The opera ends with the triumph of Harmony in the double sense of
music and of the newly found peace among European nationsa peace
116

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

117

made possible by the return of the legitimate sovereigns after the disruption caused by the French Revolution and by Napoleons conquests.
Ironically, Il Viaggioa celebration of restored European monarchiesis the work of the son of an Italian Jacobin who in 1797 had
enthusiastically welcomed the troops of General Bonaparte when they
occupied Pesaro on their way to liberate the southern regions of the
peninsula. Yet in the short time of twenty-odd years that had elapsed
since the planting of the liberty tree in Rossinis hometown, the whole
image of Europe, of her identity and collective purpose, had undergone
an unprecedented transformation.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT VIEW

The eighteenth-century reader who wished to acquire some information about the identity of the European continent, and who turned
to the most prestigious reference work of Enlightenment culture, the
Encyclopedie edited by Diderot, would find a disappointingly short and
laconic account of the subject. The article Europe was written by
that extremely prolific contributor to the Encyclopedie, the Chevalier de
Jaucourt. After a few philological remarks on the origins of the name
Europa, Jaucourt stated simply that Europe was one of the four continents, the least important for its dimensions but the richest and most
civilized:
If Europe is the smallest of the four parts of the world for its extension, it is
however the most considerable for its commerce, navigation, fertility, for its enlightenment (lumi`eres) and industry, for its knowledge of the arts, sciences and
trades.1

The article stressed that European supremacy was confirmed by the

immensity of expenses, the magnitude of engagements, the number of
troops that enabled European monarchs to achieve a high degree of
power and by Europes contribution to the establishment of the law of
nature and nations (droit politique et droit des gens).
This confident belief in the superiority of the European continent expressed in the Encyclopedie was justified in at least one respect: the concentration of resources and technology, although Europe remained second
to Asia for population. In eighteenth-century opinion, however, this belief
was only vaguely associated with specific geographical or demographic
1

Encyclopedie, repr. of the 1756 ed., Stuttgart, 19667, 35 vols., vol. 6, 21112.

118

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

factors, which were brought into the argument simply to illustrate the
opposition between Europe and other inferior civilizations.2
Already in the Esprit des Lois Montesquieu had identified one important feature that set Europe geographically apart from the rest of the world
and in particular from the Asian continent to which it was connected.
In Asia the presence of immense plains, uninterrupted by mountains or
rivers, favored the establishment of empires, since only despotic power
could control such vast extensions of territory. In Europe, on the other
hand, the existence of natural frontiers that limited the size of nations
to a relatively small scale favored the spirit of independence, the genie
de liberte, making the establishment of empires a difficult and precarious
enterprise.3
In practice, however, it was not clear where the European territory
actually began and ended. The frontiers of the great Western European
powers did not change substantially during the eighteenth century, and
the most significant expansion of the European borders was toward the
East: but observers could not decide whether that space actually counted
as Europe or not. Voltairelike Montesquieu before himhesitated to
classify Russia as European, and the very concept of Eastern Europe
was only beginning to take shape.4
Culturally, it was generally agreed that Europe alone had a legitimate
claim to the inheritance of ancient Greece and Rome (though Voltaire insisted polemically on the priority of the civilizations of the East, India and
China).5 In addition, Europes identity had been decisively shaped by the
advent of the Christian religion and by the unique fusion of Mediterranean
peoples and northern tribes.
It was, again, Montesquieus belief that the unification of the European
peoples under the spiritual influence of Christianity predisposed them to
moderation and humanity and militated against despotic practices.6 These
common features set Europe apart from the rest of the world. Combined
with the superiority of its political and legal institutions, they ensured
the existence of a shared cultural space that favored exchanges within
2
3
4
5
6

Pierre Chaunu, La civilisation de lEurope des lumi`eres (Paris: Arthaud, 1971).

Charles-Louis Secondat de Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, in Oeuvres compl`etes, ed. Roger
Caillois, 2 vols., Paris, Gallimard, vol. 2, 529 (Book XVII, ch. 6).
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Jean-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (1745), ed. R. Pomeau, 2 vols. (Paris:
Garnier, 1963).
Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, cit., Book XXIV, ch. 3; see also Book XI, ch. 6, on the
comparison between European and non-European judicial systems.

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

119

an enlightened community of educated aristocrats, writers, and scientists. A long-established tradition called this phenomenon the republique
des lettres. Indeed, evidence of this reality could be found in the wide
circulation of books and periodicals within Ancien Regime Europe. Its
geographical boundaries were displayed by the practice of the Grand
Tour.
In spite of the existence of such an intellectual community, European
did not then mean anything other than French, English, Spanish, and so
on. In the collective imagination of the century, European nations were
separate entitites, connected by close commercial and cultural exchanges
but still divided by economic, dynastic, and territorial rivalries.
The relations of European states with one another remained necessarily competitive. Enlightened intellectuals might wish for peace and good
commercial relations, deplore any form of aggressive patriotism, or disapprove of the destructive and ill-conceived military ambitions of kings; but
since international relations were thought to be economically and territorially a zero-sum game, to love ones country meant necessarily to militate
against the success of other nations. As Voltaire stressed, it was part of
the human condition that to wish for the greatness of ones country
meant to wish ill of ones neighbors. He who should not wish to see
his country larger rather than smaller, richer rather than poorer, would
be a citizen of the universe.7
REVOLUTION AND CONQUEST

What happened to this rather vague notion of Europe when the political relations within the European continent were suddenly disrupted,
from 1792, by the French revolutionary wars and by Frances subsequent transformation into an imperial power? When France declared
war against Prussia and Austria in 1792, most people expected a desperate defense of the French national territory against overwhelming
foreign armies. Twenty years later, in 1812 (the moment of greatest expansion of Napoleons empire), France ruled directly over 44 million subjects (the population of France itself being about 28 million) to which
must be added 33 to 35 million people in countries that had become
7

Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), ed. Etiemble (Paris: Garnier, 1967), article
Patrie. See also Encyclopedie, article Paix; and Istvan Hont, The Permanent Crisis
of a Divided Mankind, in John Dunn, ed., Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?
Political Studies, vol. XVII, 1994.

120

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

Frances satellites: in all about 40 percent of the entire European

population.8
The traumatic, if successful, experience of French conquest resulted
in two different and quite incompatible notions of what the collective
identity of European nations was or should be: a duplicity that can still
be recognized in the ambiguity of contemporary views about the desirable
role of the European Union.
The first of these notions is associated with the ambitions of the French
revolutionary government and of its successors, the Thermidorian and
Bonapartist regimes. Its central assumption was that if Europe was the
most civilized part of the world and revolutionary France the most civilized nation in Europe, then the same historical process leading to the
reform and modernization of France would create in due course a united
European continent in her image.
In the highly utopian vision of Enlightenment philosophers such as
Condorcet, the progress of equality within a single nation would eventually lead to the disappearance of inequality between nations and between
Europe and the rest of the world. If the European monarchs of the Ancien
Regime had exploited the poverty and barbarism of savage populations
all over the world for their own commercial advantage and had fought
among themselves for supremacy, the advent of free republican governments in France and America would, in time, bring to an end all military
conflict within Europe and all colonial domination outside it.9
Clearly, Condorcets belief that some day the sun . . . [would] only
shine upon free men and Bonapartes far more prosaic notion that ce qui
est bon pour les francais est bon pour tout le monde (what is good enough
for the French is good enough for everybody) were not exactly the same
thing. Yet both phrases assumed the fundamental identity of needs and
expectations in human beings, regardless of their circumstances, ethnic
origins, traditions, and national characters. The abolition in France of
Ancien Regime institutions and their replacement with the new principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity brought about the increasing political,
legal, and cultural homogeneity of those nations that came in contact with
it, in the first instance the European ones.
8

A. Fierro, A. Paullel-Guillard, J. Tulard, Histoire et dictionnaire du Consulat et de lEmpire

(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995); Andrina Stiles, Napoleon, France and Europe (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1993); J. Lovie and A. Paullel-Guillard, LEpisode Napoleonien,
vol. 2, Aspects exterieurs, Nouvelle Histoire de la France Contemporaine, vol. 5 (Paris:
Seuil, 1972).
Jean-Marie Caritat de Condorcet, Esquisse dun tableau historique des progr`es de lesprit
humain, ed. M. and F. Hincker (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), Dixi`eme periode, 253ff.

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

121

These universalistic aspirations were expressed by the National Assembly in the Declaration of Rights of 1789. The Declaration never specifically
mentioned France, but it referred to governments (in the plural) and
to any society or any political community. During the extensive debate about the Declaration, it was made clear that the document outlined
the fundamental principles which must provide the ground for all government and that the French people [were] the first of all peoples and
a model for every nation.10
Frances leading role, as originally understood by the National Assembly, was not to impose French rules and French standards on other nations, even less to conquer them by force. As Francois Furet has reminded
us, moderate forces in the National Assembly initiated the war in 1792
for reasons far more connected with domestic problems than with international concerns; in principle, the Jacobins were hostile to the competitive logic that opposed European nations in the Ancien Regime political
tradition.11
The French Constitution of 1791 stated clearly Frances commitment
to respect the freedom and autonomy of other peoples: The French nation will never undertake any war with the aim of conquest and will
never employ her armed forces against the freedom of any country.12
This is why, during the revolution, annexation (in 1791 Avignon, in 1792
the Savoy, in 1793 Nice) was pursued halfheartedly, generally on the
more or less spontaneous solicitation of local patriots rather than by
direct initiative of the Assembly. The notions of natural frontiers, of
the liberation and reunion of sister republics, filled the gap between the practice of occupation and the project of a confederacy of free
states.13
French conquests spread farther under the Directory (Holland in 1795,
northern Italy and Genoa in 1797, Switzerland in 1798). To the ideological uneasiness was added the anxiety of how to rule over peoples and
10
11

12

13

Christine Faure, ed., Les declarations des droits de lhomme de 1789 (Paris: Payot, 1988),
22.
Francois Furet, Les girondins et la guerre: les debuts de lAssemble legislative, in
F. Furet and M. Ozouf, eds., La Gironde et les Girondins (Paris: Payot, 1991); Paul W.
Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 17631848 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994).
Montmorin to the National Assembly, 22 May 1790; later embodied in the Constitution,
Titre VI: La Nation francaise renonce a` entreprendre aucune guerre dans la vue de faire
des conquetes et nemploiera jamais ses forces contre la liberte daucun peuple in Jacques
Godechot ed., Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 65.
See Denis Richet, Fronti`eres naturelles, in F. Furet and M. Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire
critique de la Revolution francaise (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).

122

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

territories that were far from homogeneous and sympathetic. The lack of
global hegemonic design, the occasional character of military aggression,
and the piecemeal strategy of opportunity and improvisation remained
constant features of French conquest.
Naturally, both the Directory and the Consulate derived very substantial advantages from the politics of conquest, and soon these benefits
became essential to their political and financial survival. Moreover, in realizing some of the cherished military and economic ambitions of the old
monarchy, these governments reproduced to some extent the strategies
and organizational patterns that had been designed for similar purposes
(in some cases by the same people) under the Ancien Regime. In particular, the renewal of army personnel and army ranks, the development
of new technologies for the artillery, the reorganization of transport and
supplies, and above all the introduction of conscription to cut military expenses were projects hatched by Louis XVIs war office, but the faltering
monarchy had been unable to implement them.14
In spite of this continuity postrevolutionary French governments could
never entirely free themselves from the universalistic and, paradoxically,
pacifist postures of the Jacobins. In the long run the empire became the
only viable solution to these contradictions, the only formula that made it
possible for Bonaparte to reconcile French supremacy with the vision of
a peaceful sisterhood of European nations, a sisterhood that would come
fully into being as soon as all perverse resistance and sinister opposition
against it ceased. The attempts at administrative integration of the occupied territories, the imposition of the Code Napoleon, and the creation
of a large bureaucratic class (which in some cases included important
sections of the local e lites) were all part of this design.15
Napoleon regarded this process of modernization and administrative unification as the real strength of his rule and as the self-evident proof

of its historical legitimacy. In 1807 he wrote to his brother Jerome,

king
of Westfalia:
The benefits of the Code Napoleon, the publicity of procedures, the establishment
of juries should be the distinctive characteristics of your monarchy. And, to be
honest, I trust more to their effects to extend and strengthen your power than to
14

15

On these aspects of the reform of the French army, see Azar Gat, The Origins of Military
Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
2553. For further bibliographic references, see Biancamaria Fontana, Politique de
Laclos (Paris: Kime, 1996), 5563.
Stuart Woolf, Napoleons Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991).

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

123

the results of the greatest victories. What people would submit itself again to an
arbitrary government [that is, Prussia] after having enjoyed the benefits of a wise
and liberal administration?16

To the end of his life Napoleon remained attached to an implausible

vision of his empire as a confederation in the model of ancient Greek
federations or of the American Congress. During his final captivity in
St. Helena, he confessed to Las Cases:
One of my great designs was the agglomeration, the concentration of the same
geographical peoples (peuples geographiques) which revolutions and politics had
broken down. I would have liked to make of each of these peoples one and the
same national body. . . . After this first approximate simplification, there would be
more opportunities to bring everywhere unity of laws, of principles, of opinions,
sentiments, views and interests. Then perhaps it would have been possible to
dream for the great European family of a political model such as that of the
American Congress or of the Amphictyons of Greece.17

It would be only too easy to question the good faith and credibility
of such statements. In some cases the French occupation encountered the
strenuous resistance of the local populationsa resistance that, in the case
of Spain for example, could hardly be described as the product of a reactionary conspiracy. Even in those countries where the French troops were
welcomed at first as liberators by the local patriots, this initial enthusiasm
soon gave way to bitter disappointment when French conquest showed its
true colors in the practice of systematic pillage and repression as well as
in the ruthless surrendering of territories to the enemythe exchange
of Lombardy and Venice sanctioned by the Treaty of Campoformio that
left the Venetian patriots who had supported the French at the mercy of
the Austrians.
Similarly, the integration of local elites in the new French administrations all over Europe had a very limited impact and offered no real
alternative to the straightforward enforcement of French interests. Yet
for all its inadequacies, Napoleons imperial adventure remained inextricably bound with the revolutionary heritage and with the universalistic
tradition of the Enlightenment; it represented a novel, distinctly modern
16

17

Napoleon to Jerome,
15 November 1807; see also his speech to the Corps legislatif of
15 February 1805: It is my task, our task, the task of the most gentle, most enlightened,
most human of peoples to remind to the civilized nations of Europe that they are part
of one family and that the energies they engage in their civil conflicts are a blow to the
common prosperity.
Napoleon to Las Cases, 11 November 1816.

124

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

project of European hegemony, one that unsettled all traditional views

about national rivalries and the balance of powers.

THE OPPOSITION TO NAPOLEON

An alternative notion of Europe to emerge from the French revolution

was associated with those liberal intellectuals who, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, found themselves in opposition to Napoleons imperial regime. Their critical response was primarily directed against the
military ambitions of the French revolutionary and postrevolutionary governments. In contemplating the disastrous consequences of a prolonged
European war, however, they were led to question those cosmopolitan
ideals to which some leading exponents of the Enlightenment had been
so ready to subscribe.
This anti-imperialist approach is well exemplified by the works of
Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant, two writers who, though assimilated within French culture, were born in sister republics whose
territories were threatened by the expansionistic ambitions of the French:
the republics of Geneva and Bern.18 De Staels chateau of Coppet, near
Geneva, was for several decades a cosmopolitan meeting point for exiles and political refugees as well as an important center for collective
reflection on the future of European politics and culture.19
These critiques of the unification of Europe under French rule re-echoed
themes that Montesquieu had employed to stigmatize the administrative
centralism of the French monarchy: namely, uniformity was a mode of absolutism, and the suppression of local differences and regional specificities
was an essential feature of despotic power. Montesquieu wrote:
The monarch, who knows each one of his provinces, can establish different laws
and tolerate different practices. But the despot knows nothing, and cannot fix
his attention on anything in particular; he needs a general approach (une allure
generale); he governs through a rigid will which is the same everywhere; everything
is flattened under his feet.20
18

19

20

After the French occupation of 1798, Constants hometown, Lausanne, was detached
from the Bernese territory and became the capital of a new canton established under
French protectorate, the Vaud.
See AAVV Le Groupe de Coppet et lEurope, 17891830, 5`eme Colloque de Coppet
(Lausanne and Paris: Jean Touzot Libraire/Editeur, 1994); Pierre Kholer, Madame de
Stael et la Suisse (Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1916); Annales Benjamin Constant 1819,
special issue, Les conditions de la vie culturelle et intellectuelle en Suisse Romande au
temps des Lumi`eres (Gen`eve: Slatkine, 1996).
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, cit., Book VI, ch. 1.

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

125

Although the majority of national characters in Il Viaggio a Reims

were the product of Rossinis own imagination, one of them, the
Italian poetess Corinna, was borrowed from Corinne, ou lItalie, a successful novel published by de Stael in 1807. Set in contemporary Rome,
the novel celebrated the importance of the Italian republican tradition
as a bulwark against present decadence and tyranny: an implicit attack
against the French occupation that did not escape the emperors
attention.21
More generally, de Staels writings focused upon national specificities
within European literature and philosophy as well as on the original contribution of Italian, Spanish, German, and English culture, which in her
view were too little known and appreciated by the French public. In De
la litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales
published in 1800, as in her influential work of 1810, De lAllemagne
(destroyed at the printer by the Napoleonic police), she returned to
Montesquieus idea of the fusion of peoples of the North and peoples
of the South to show that the winning feature of European civilization
was the diversity of contributions and the variety of national traditions
and talents.22 Thus, the efforts made during the revolution to impose uniform patterns of aesthetic achievements were bound to prove counterproductive. Similarly, in Considerations sur la Revolution francaise (181218),
de Stael stigmatized Napoleons policy of denationalization and claimed
that Europe would free itself from despotism only on the strength of national sentiment.23
The vision that emerged was no longer that of a European republique
des lettres dominated by the more advanced and sophisticated French
culture, but of an integrated unity that depended on a variety of traditions
and local experiences to preserve political liberty as well as to promote
artistic achievement.24
In his passionate pamphlet of 1813, De lesprit de conquete, Constant
traced a dramatic picture of the evils of modern imperialism. Unlike ancient tribes, which fought for need and to satisfy their heroic instincts,
21
22

23
24

(Paris: Perrin,
Ghislain de Diesbach, Napoleon juge de Corinne, in Madame de Stael
1983), 3735.
On the importance of the fusion between peoples of the North and of the South in shaping
the French nation, see Robert de Montlosier, De la Monarchie francaise (Paris: Gideet
fils, 1814).
On de Stael, see Henri Guillemin, Madame de Stael et Napoleon (Paris: Seuil, 1987);
Simone Balaye, Madame de Stael, Lumi`eres et Liberte (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979).
On the transformation of republican culture in the postrevolutionary period, see
Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).

126

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

modern conquerors acted in cold blood and were motivated by greed

alone. Although ancient empires respected the diversity of the peoples
they dominated, allowing them to retain their own customs and beliefs, the
modern empire imposed an artificial uniformity of rule, administration,
law, cult, and even language. By flattening local differences, it crushed
at the same time the fundamental dignity and identity of its subjects,
depriving them of all capacity for resistance, making of them the passive instruments of its political and military ambitions. It is somewhat
remarkable, wrote Constant
that uniformity should never have encountered greater favour than in a revolution
made in the name of the rights and liberty of men . . .. While patriotism exists only
by a vivid attachment to the interests, the way of life, the customs of some locality,
our so-called patriots have declared war on all of these. They have dried up this
natural source of patriotism and have sought to replace it by a fictitious passion
for an abstract being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination
and speak to the memory.25

To this deadly uniformity of the empire, Constant opposed the living

association of European nations, bound by mutual commercial interests
and a common need for freedom and peace. It was in vain that Bonapartes
despotism tried to impose commercial restrictionssuch as the Continental blockadeor to force countries into antagonistic positions: while in
Europe a single nation, England, remained free, despotism would never
triumph, since the close communications existing among countries would
always enable people, resources, and ideas to circulate, escaping from the
regimes destructive grasp.
FROM PARIS TO VIENNA

Constants idealized picture of a community of peaceful, commerceoriented European nations united against despotism, if justified in the
context of a pamphlet written on the eve of Napoleons defeat, concealed
the most problematic implications of his analysis. The Europe of commerce and freedomwhere money fled from the constraints of national
frontiers, and individuals refused to fight for a cause they did not understand or left their country in search of a better lifestyle or more liberal
governmentwas no less exposed to the risks of instability than had been
25

The Spirit of Conquest, in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Political Writings of Benjamin
Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 16, 734.

The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations

127

Bonapartes empire, as the general economic crisis that followed the end
of the French wars in 1815 was soon to show.26
Commerce was at least as effective as war in destroying national identities and local attachments; it turned the population of Europe into a
great mass of human beings, that . . . despite the different names under
which they live and their different forms of social organization, are essentially homogeneous in their nature.27 In this respect the long-term
effects of the development of an international market economy went in
the same direction as imperial conquest, bringing about the creation of a
large, anonymous, potentially disaffected market society.
No doubt Napoleons conquests had alerted European governments to
the dangers of revolution and uncontrolled imperial ambitions. Above all,
however, they proved the inadequacy of the balance-of-power system that
had dominated European international politics throughout the eighteenth
century. This system assumed that European powers, while pursuing their
particular national interests, would achieve a kind of spontaneous equilibrium through commercial and military competition. It was now clear
that this assumption was implausible and unrealisticas utopian, in fact,
as any Enlightenment ideal of universal brotherhood and world peace.
The protracted negotiations that began on the occasion of the peace
of Paris in May 1814 and continued at the Congress of Vienna (between
October 1814 and June 1815) reflected a new vision: European stability
could no longer be left to the operation of spontaneous forces or to opportunistic dynastic alliances; it had to be constructed and closely monitored
at a continental level.
Although the rhetoric of the participants to the Congress advocated
the restoration of legitimate sovereigns and the return to the prerevolutionary status quo, several changes brought about by the Napoleonic
wars to the configuration of European frontiers were implicitly endorsed.
The Congress accepted, for example, the disappearance of a plethora of
small states (the number of German principates was reduced to 38 from
about 300) and promoted the creation of large buffer states to protect the
26

27

On the economic performance of the Napoleonic regime and the 1815 crisis, see the evaluations offered by Thomas Malthus and by Constants Scottish friend James Mackintosh.
They both stress the advantages for France of Napoleons commercial protectionism and
imperialistic policy. T. R. Malthus, The Ground of an Opinion of the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn (London: 1815), footnote p. 12; and S. Hollander,
Malthus and the Post-Napoleonic Depression, History of Political Economy, vol. 1
(1969), 30635; James Mackintosh, France, Edinburgh Review 34 (August 1820):
139.
Spirit of Conquest, ch. 2, cit., 523.

128

B IANCAMARIA F ONTANA

areas of potential conflict. Similarly, the Congress rejected the Prussian

proposal for a partition of French territory: in fact, France was restored
to her frontiers of 1790, thus depriving her of all conquered territories
but confirming her status as a major European power. The creation of the
Quadruple Alliance in November 1815 established the principle of permanent consultation and concerted agreements among the major powers
to preserve stability.28
This unwillingness to restore the past was not confined to strategic
arrangements and piecemeal solutions. It implied a profound transformation of the global vision of the European continent, a transformation for
which Napoleons imperialism, even in its defeat, must ultimately take the
credit.
The Europe of the Congress of Vienna, dominated by the interests of
the great powers at the expense of their subjects and satellites, little resembles de Staels Europe of nations in which the genius of northern and
southern peoples would come together in freedom and peaceful cooperation. Indeed, the tension between these two visions would recurrently
surface in national conflicts throughout the nineteenth century. Yet with
the settlements of the Congress of Vienna, the modern idea of Europe had
reached a point of no return. From now on the European identity would
no longer reside in shared traditions, in religious and cultural affinities. It
had become a distinctive political reality, the privileged framework within
which single nations had to find their place and a mode of coexistence.
28

On the balance of powers, the French wars, and the Congress of Vienna, see Schroeder,
The Transformation of European Politics. See also David Thompson, Europe since
Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957); Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The
Rise of Great Powers, 16481815 (Harlow: Longman, 1983); Jeremy Black, The Rise of
European Powers, 16791793 (London: Edward Arnold, 1990).

6
Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: The
European Citizen According to Max Weber
WILFRIED NIPPEL

The monumental though fragmentary work of German sociologist and

economist Max Weber (18641920) is focused on the quest for the particularity of modern Western civilization.1 Its vanishing point is the uniqueness of modern rational capitalism with its preconditions in, and repercussions on, all aspects of social life. Weber, however, did not develop a
theory of the modern world; he embarked rather on its prerequisites in
classical antiquity and the middle ages and on crosscultural comparisons
with the great civilizations of the Oriental world. That was partly because of his scholarly education; he started his career with works on the
interdependence of legal and economic structures in late medieval Italy
and ancient Rome.2 But it was also because of his growing insight that the
structural preconditions that enabled the development of a capitalistic culture in the Occidental world and hampered it in the Oriental world could
be adequately analyzed only from a point of view of universal history.
The more Weber developed his comparative approach, the more significant became the implications of diverse types of citizenship in the West
and the absence of a notion of citizenship in the East. He had already

covered certain aspects of this subject in his article Agrarverhaltnisse

1

The following abbreviations are used for Webers publications: ASAC for The Agrarian
Sociology of Ancient Civilisations, trans. R. I. Frank (London: New Left Books, 1976)

im Altertum, 1909]; E&S for Economy and

[contains the 3rd ed. of Agrarverhaltnisse
Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New

York: Bedminster, 1968); GARS for Gesammelte Aufsatze

zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols.

(19201), reprinted (Tubingen:

Mohr (Siebeck), 1988); MWG for Max Weber Gesamtaus

gabe (Tubingen:
Mohr (Siebeck), 1982); SWG for Gesammelte Aufsatze
zur Sozial- und

Mohr (Siebeck), 1988); and WuG for

Wirtschaftgeschichte (1924), reprinted (Tubingen:
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th ed., ed. Johannes

Winckelmann (Tubingen:
Mohr (Siebeck), 1976).
Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Enke, 1889), and Die

das Staats- und Privatrecht (Stuttgart:

romische
Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung fur

Deininger, 1982.
Enke, 1891) = MWG I/2, ed. by Jurgen

129

130

W ILFRIED N IPPEL

im Altertum for the encyclopedia Handworterbuch

der Staatswissenschaften, which in its final version (1909) became a text of book length.3
His most mature treatment, however, is the essay Die Stadt (The City),
published posthumously in 1921 and nowadays known as part of his
main work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society).4 The article is obviously incomplete; it was apparently drafted between 1911 and
late 1913 or early 1914 and drew on Webers studies on the sociology of
world religions, something he had been working on since about 1910 or
1911.5 Die Stadt probably originated as a special section on nonlegitimate domination within his discussion of the sociology of domination
intended for Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. But it is far from certain whether
Weber would have incorporated the text exactly as it now is into this work
or used at least parts of it in the context of his work on the sociology of
world religions.6
The title Die Stadt is somewhat misleading. True, Weber began by
attempting to provide an adequate definition of the city. He tried out
definitions based on geographical, economic, social, and legal criteria one
after the other, but he came to the conclusion that, given the variety of
cities all over the world, any comprehensive definition must necessarily
be incomplete. In his essay Weber concentrated on the city with a distinct
political-administrative statusnamely, the commune consisting of a selfgoverning body of citizens (die Stadt im Rechtssinne, die Gemeinde) who
enjoy some autonomy and are entitled to install a magistracy, administer
a judiciary of their own, and pass bylaws. There is a certain ambiguity in
this definition since Weber wanted to cover different legal types of cities:
the fully autonomous ancient city-state, and the Italian city-republics as
their equivalent, as well as self-governing medieval cities that (as subjects
of a kingdom, principality, or the Holy Roman Empire) could make no
claim to sovereignty. By using the Gemeinde as the key criterion, he chose
the minimum definition for a self-governing urban community that could
be matched by the ancient and Italian city-republics a fortiori. Whereas
citiesfortified settlements with marketplacescan be found all over the
world, Webers commune of urban citizens is a peculiar phenomenon that
prevailed only within the culture of the Occident.
3
4
5

SWG 1288 = ASAC 35386.

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47 (1921): 621722; WuG 727814.
Archiv fur
Beginning in 1915, a series of articles by Weber on Confucianism, Hinduism, and
Buddhism was published. The collection in GARS is now superseded by MWG I/19 and
I/20, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, 1989 and 1996.
See my edition of Die Stadt, MWG I/22, 5, 1999.

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

131

OCCIDENT VERSUS ORIENT

Weber had already stressed in Agrarverhaltnisse

im Altertum that this
was the fundamental difference between the Occidental (Graeco-Roman)
world and the Oriental world (ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel).
In that article he had described two distinct patterns of development for
all the peoples in Antiquity from the Seine to the Euphrates among whom
urban centres developed.7 The difference between them was attributed
to basic geographical and ecological factors. The citizen-state as a selforganizing military body developed in the coastal civilization of the GrecoRoman world, because there the aristocracies had access to the gains made
from commerce and thus could reduce the kingdom to a merely military
leadership and finally get rid of it altogether. Later they had to accept
the political participation of the bulk of the citizenry who, as hoplites,
provided most of the military.
Priests were always mere functionaries of the community: they could
claim no independent authority in political questions. In the civilizations
at the banks of great rivers, the necessities of river regulation and irrigation strengthened the primordial kingdoms and nurtured the development
of a centralized bureaucracy subject to a monarch with an indisputable
monopoly in political, military, and economic power. The monarch could
rely on the support of a privileged priesthood. On this basis there later
emerged what Weber described as the authoritarian liturgical state. In it
the states necessities were met by a carefully contrived system of duties
imposed on the states subjects.8 In the end this authoritarian liturgical state, especially as it had been created in Ptolemaic Egypt, came to
dominate the later Roman Empire.
Weber used this scheme again in Die Stadt in order to stress the distinctness of developmental patterns, once the primordial state of universally similar urban centers had been abandoned. The crosscultural comparison now included the Middle Ages on the European side and India,
China, and in some respects Japan on the Oriental side. The great Oriental
civilizations were seen as almost invariable with respect to their main
structural features from ancient to early modern times. The interdependence of irrigation systems and bureaucratic state apparatusa version
of the topic of Oriental despotism familiar since Montesquieuwas
again mentioned with respect to the strength of the Chinese monarchy.
But Weber now stressed cultural factors in order to explain why in China
7

ASAC 69 = SWG 35.

ASAC 74 = SWG 39f.

132

W ILFRIED N IPPEL

and India a breakthrough in this direction never took place despite certain
tendencies toward city autonomy and the actual, if not legally endorsed,
role of the guilds.
In his view commune-building depends on the ability of the members

to unite in a ritual community that he calls Verbruderung

(confraternity),
a community based on artificially-created and freely-willed mutual ties,
not on consanguinity. This meant that the community depended on the
equal rights (in principle at least) of all its members, solidarity against
nonmembers, connubium, and a common cult symbolically expressed in
communal cult meals.9 According to Webers interpretation, the rigid caste
system established in India after the final victory of Brahmanism prevented (particularly through its exclusion of any kind of commensality
between members of different castes) the emergence of any confraternal
structure.10 In the Chinese case it was the ancestor cult that had the corresponding effect, since it bound the city-dwellers to their respective sibs,
or clans, and villages of origin.
MIDDLE AGES VERSUS ANTIQUITY

The notion of Verbruderung

explains the fundamental difference between
Occidental and Oriental city-dwellers and their different potential for
commune-building; it also allows Weber to accentuate an important distinction between European Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He assumes
that confraternity can be established by groups such as sibs or by individuals, but the highest intensity is achieved only in the latter case.
In pre-Christian Antiquity religion did not inhibit confraternity, but
it did not provide any positive predispositions for it either. Confraternity materialized in the union of heads of sibs that originally constituted the city-state by means of synoikismos (the real housing together
in an urban center or the constitution of a singular political center for
hitherto separate communities). The patrician clans, however, tried to
preserve their ritual exclusivity with respect to the plebeians, an exclusivity abolished only after prolonged struggles between the social orders
had resulted in a more equitable relationship between citizens of all social
ranks. According to Weber, the ancient city-states failed to reach the intensity of confraternity that was later achieved in the medieval commune
9
10

E&S 1241 = WuG 744.

Buddhism flourished especially in the age of the Maurya Dynasty in the third century BC;
its decline and final supersession by Brahmanism took several centuries.

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

133

where burghers constituted the community by means of the coniuratio

(an oath taken by each individual).
In the European Middle Ages confraternity possessed a positive religious basis, since all the members already belonged to the same church,
as symbolized in the community of the Eucharist. (Of course, this inevitably implied the outsider-status of the Jews.) Confraternity was also
the constituent element of the formation of nonprivileged citizens within
the commune (the Italian popolo) and of the guilds (social clubs as
well as economic pressure groups) and diverse kinds of religious
associations.
In this context the role of Greco-Roman Antiquity is somewhat diminished. The constitutive acts of founding a commune in Antiquity (by
synoikismos) and in the Middle Ages (by coniuratio) are seen as equivalents, whereas community-building within the ancient city is depicted as
deficient in some respect. This is due to Webers decision to concentrate
on the act of foundation rather than analyze the different kinds of confraternities that developed out of the religious festivals of the city-state
and its subdivisions.11 And it leaves open the question of how and when
the emergence of Christianity changed the social and cultural character
of the cities in the Roman Empire. Weber referred (here and elsewhere) to
the breakthrough in Antioch praised by St. Paul (Galatians 2) when the
community of the Lords Supper was practiced for the first time between
circumcised and uncircumcised Christians. This practice implied that the
Judaeo-Christians no longer considered themselves to be bound by Jewish
ritual law. This event, Weber claimed, was the moment of the conception
of the citizens association, although it would not see the final light of
day until the first coniurationes of city-dwellers in the medieval cities a
thousand years later.12 He did not enter into the complicated historical
and theological questions that created numerous controversies within the
early Christian community (characterized in the Antiochene case by the
conduct of St. Peter who first participated in the new table-fellowship and
then later withdrew from it).13 Weber was only interested in a theme in
11

12
13

Wilfried Nippel, Max Weber zwischen Althistorie und Universalgeschichte: Synoikismos

und Verbruderung,
in Christian Meier, ed., Die okzidentale Stadt nach Max Weber

Oldenbourg, 1994), 3557.

(Munchen:
GARS II, 39f. = MWG I/20, 96f.
For the complicated details see James D. G. Dunn, The Incident at Antioch (Gal. 2:
1118), Journal for the Study of the New Testament 18 (1983): 357; E. P. Sanders,
Jewish Association with Gentiles and Galatians 2: 1114, in R. T. Fortna and B. R.
Gaventa, eds., The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John in Honor of
J. Louis Martyn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 17088.

134

W ILFRIED N IPPEL

which the incident at Antioch could be perceived retrospectively as the

turning point that led to the universality of Christianity. His argument
thus left a huge void between the beginning of the Christian era and the
high Middle Ages, a period of a thousand years that is not discussed in
any of the historical parts of Webers work.
Instead, Weber embarked on a comparison of the structural similarities between the constitutional development in Antiquity and the Middle
Ages that in each case led from a domination of patrician families to more
popular regimes (which in most cases, however, were finally led by a new
political elite formed by the merger of an old patriciate with the leading
members of the hitherto underprivileged citizens). These processes led to
the rationalization of the political system by the establishment of magistracies with restricted terms of office and clearly defined competencies, by
the codification of laws, and by rules for the creation of new laws. Webers
comparison relates to the classical ancient city-states (Sparta, Athens,
Republican Rome) and the Italian city-states. It considers inter alia similarities between the Roman plebs and the Italian popolo, who with their
respective representatives (tribuni plebis, capitani del popolo) formed an
alternative political organization that duplicated, in certain respects, the
institutions of the city-government. (Weber also discussed at length the exceptional case of Venice. The Venetian patriciate maintained its political
hegemony for centuries without being seriously challenged by the bulk
of the population.)14 But Weber warns that parallels between political
superstructures may indicate identical economic bases. (It is also worth
mentioning that Webers comparisons always begin with the Middle Ages
and that the medieval examples are described in much more detail than
the ancient ones.) The fundamental difference between the ancient and
the medieval city lay in the relationship between the city and its hinterland. In the ancient world both spheres constituted a political unity that
implied that the peasants made up the majority of citizens. In the Middle
Ages city and hinterland were two legally distinct spheres, and peasants
were not entitled to citizen-rights.
In the last part of Die Stadt Weber returned to the question of
economic rationality in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ideas he had

originally sketched out in the concluding part of Agrarverhaltnisse

im
14

With his comparison of popular magistrates of ancient and Renaissance times and his
allusion to the Myth of Venice, Weber followed a centuries-old tradition of political
thought. See Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and Modern Republicanism: Mixed Constitution and Ephors, in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 626.

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

135

Altertum. In Die Stadt he makes the famous distinction between the

ancient homo politicus and the medieval homo oeconomicus:
The specifically medieval city type, the artisan inland city, was altogether economically oriented. . . . Whereas in Antiquity the hoplite army and its training,
and thus military interests, increasingly came to constitute the pivot of all urban
organisation, in the Middle Ages most burgher privileges began with the limitation of the burghers military duties to garrison service. The economic interests
of the medieval townsman lay in peaceful gain through commerce and the trade,
and this was most pronouncedly so for the lower strata of the urban citizenry. . . .
The political situation of the medieval townsman determined his path, which was
that of a homo oeconomicus, whereas in Antiquity the polis preserved during its
heyday its character as the technically most advanced military organisation. The
ancient townsman was a homo politicus.15

For the purpose of this particular comparison, the medieval city

was represented by the type of the artisanal inland city (burgerliche

gewerbliche Binnenstadt) of Europe north of the Alps. These cities were
embedded in a power structure that did not allow them to play an independent military role. Consequently, they did not offer their citizens
opportunities for material gain by military and political means or burden
them with more than a minimum of military service. Therefore, the northern European cities stood in sharp contrast to the ancient city-republics.
The Italian city-states were located between these extremes. The maritime
republics of Venice and Genoa were closer to the ancient example; some
of the Italian inland city-states also displayed some of the features of the
ancient ones because of their ability to pursue expansionist policies. But
the bulk of the citizenry (largely craftsmen) was like its northern European counterpart, overwhelmingly interested in economic policies that
promoted its commercial interests.
In Antiquity the typically declassed citizen was a dispossessed farmer.
In the Middle Ages he was an unemployed craftsman. This difference determined the different character of the class struggle in the two societies,
as well as the direction of the cities economic policy, which only in the
Middle Ages sought to protect the interests of local producers. An ancient
demos (which participated in the gains of an expansionist policy by colonization, booty, grain distributions, soldiers pay, and political reward)
was only concerned about preserving the exclusivity of its status and not
inclined to a peaceful acquisition of wealth through industry and trade.
These warrior guilds, therefore, maintained a closed-shop with respect to citizen status. This implied, especially in the Greek case, an
15

E&S 1353f. = WuG 805.

136

W ILFRIED N IPPEL

inability to build up stable empires. Citizens maintained status distinctions against metics (resident aliens), freedmen, and slaves. This meant
that groups such as metics and freedmen were the only ones truly oriented toward the pursuit of peacefully acquired profit through commerce
and trade. There could be no guilds in the proper sense. The creation of
guilds for the first time during the Middle Ages constituted the organization of labor on the basis of formally free contract, which Weber qualified
as the most productive type of labor organization in history. Thus, citizens
are likely to choose economic rationality only if they have no chance to
acquire material gains by military means or, to put it another way, only
if they are no longer occupied by compulsory military functions. That is
why the foundations for rational capitalism could be laid only in the later
Middle Ages and not in Antiquity.
Missing from this thesis are two crucial test casesnamely, the cities
within the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. Weber himself said that in a
unified and pacified Mediterranean world the ancient city became the
centre of exclusively economic interests.16 Therefore, these structures
would have required a more thorough analysis beyond the statement that
the bureaucratic monarchy, and the shift from coastal to continental civilization, dealt a fatal blow to any dynamic economical development. It is
also a pity that Weber did not expand his argument concerning the preconditions of economic rationalization with respect to the later developments
in early-modern Europe. The Netherlandish and English cities could have
served as test cases. Weber stresses the exceptional status of English cities
(apart from London) whose communal rights in the Middle Ages had
always depended on concessions by the crown.
Since he held that the political structures of Antiquity were responsible for the limits of economical rationalization, Weber was unable to
understand fully the essence of ancient politics, especially in those areas
where it distracted the bulk of the citizenry from rationalized economic
production. This comes out most clearly in Webers rather gloomy and
one-sided picture of Athenian democracy. The political participation of
citizens (service in the political institutions and in military campaigns
of proportions which no other differentiated culture in history has ever
experienced before or since) is seen as an impediment to pacific economic acquisition based on rational and continuous economic activity.
The liturgies, a mixture of compulsory duties and volunteer engagements
by which wealthy citizens contributed to the financing of the fleet and of
16

ASAC 358 = SWG 271.

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

137

public festivals, are viewed unfavorably by Weber, since in his opinion

they subjected any accumulation of wealth to the utmost instability. The
system of popular courts in which even civil trials were decided by hundreds of lay jurymen implied an arbitrariness of justice that imperilled
the safeguards of the formal law. As a result, the mere continued existence of wealth is to be marvelled at, rather than the violent reversals of
fortunes which occurred after every political mishap.17 Moreover, the
demands of the polis as a military association implied that it punished
any kind of behaviour which might endanger the military and political
morals and discipline. . . . As a matter of principle, thus, there was no
freedom of personal conduct.18
Weber followed a long tradition of criticism that held Graeco-Roman
Antiquity responsible for cultivating the omnipotence of the state and preventing economic progress. This tradition goes back to the Scottish and
French Enlightenment. It then was taken up in the French postrevolutionary debate (in reaction to the cult of Antiquity fostered by the Jacobins).
In 1819 Benjamin Constant summarized and sharpened it in his famous
essay on the distinction between the freedom of the ancients and that of
the moderns. Finally, the tradition was developed in greater historical detail by late-nineteenth-century authors such as N. D. Fustel de Coulanges
and Jacob Burckhardt.19

CONCLUSION

I have deliberately stressed certain lacunae of Webers account and some

of his more questionable judgments. But that should not obscure the importance of his approach. His analysis is unsurpassed with regard to the
emergence of political structures, the institutionalization of magistracies
acting on the basis of rules defined by the community, the establishment
17
19

18 E&S 1360 = WuG 809.

E&S 1361f = WuG 810.
Benjamin Constant, De la liberte des anciens comparee a` celle des modernes (Paris,
1819) [English translation in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 30728]; Numa Denis Fustel
de Coulanges, La cite antique (Paris, 1864) [English translation: The Ancient City, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]; and Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, 4 vols., Berlin, 18981902). Compare on this tradition Nicole Loraux and
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Formation of Bourgeois Athens: An Essay on Historiography
between 1750 and 1850, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics, Ancient and Modern (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 82140. For the increasing dissociation from the model of
antiquity by the American Founding Fathers see Paul A. Rahe, Republics: Ancient
and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For further refer
ences see Wilfried Nippel, Republik, Kleinstaat, Burgergemeinde,
in Peter Blickle, ed.,

Oldenbourg, 1996), 22547.

Theorien kommunaler Ordnung in Europa (Munchen:

138

W ILFRIED N IPPEL

of formal rules for the administration of laws and for the passing of new
laws. Indeed, his analysis opens up comparative approaches that illuminate both the similarities and the differences between the ancient and the
medieval type of citizenry. The fundamental distinction between homo
politicus and homo oeconomicus holds true despite all the objections
that might be raised with respect to specific details. Finally, Webers insistence on the cultural and religious foundations of citizenship cannot be
overrated.20 Again, one may object that his selective treatment of Oriental
cultures (aiming, as it does, at the contrast with the Western world) reveals
a certain Eurocentrism (or Orientalism, the fashionable term). But the
peculiarity of the Western tradition of personal liberty, political participation, and rule of law is not just a projection of cultural prejudice.21 The

notion of Verbruderung,
as an account of the process of individualization
fostered by Christianity, brilliantly captures the fundamental differences
between the West and the various civilizations of the Orient.22 Anyone
who wishes to come to terms with the historical dimensions of this tradition, however it may be constructed, must accept Webers challenge.23
20
21

22
23

Stephen Kalberg, Cultural Foundations of Modern Citizenship, in Bryan S. Turner,

ed., Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993), 91114.
R. W. Davis, ed., The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Donald W. Treadgold, Freedom: A History (New York: New York
University Press, 1990). The latter book is rather disappointing.
See Benjamin Nelson, On Orient and Occident in Max Weber, Social Research 43
(1976): 11429.
This can be seen in the works of John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and
Consequences of the Rise of the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) and Michael Mann, The
Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

7
The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude
MICHAEL HERZFELD

Individualism has long been a stereotype of European identity. In such

magisterial works as C. B. Macphersons The Rise of Possessive Individualism and, in a contrastive mode, Louis Dumonts Homo Hierarchicus,
the conventional self-view of Europeans as autonomous selves possessing discrete property and distinctive properties appears as a fundamental
assumption, the bedrock on which virtually all explorations of European
society and culture comfortably rest.1 In the nineteenth century, notably in
the writings of the conservative politician-pamphleteer Francois Guizot,
that self was expanded to fill the image, not only of a nation (France), but
of a far larger entity that was at once continent, idea, and culturenamely,
Europe itself.2
That concept was powerfully exported through colonial and other
extensions of the imperial European presence. An outstanding example is the celebration of rugged individualism in the United States,
where today that notion of tough self-underscores a range of ideologies
The first version of this chapter was presented as the inaugural Distinguished Lecture in
European Ethnology given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, on
November 7, 1996. I am especially grateful to Jacqueline Urla and Ralph Faulkingham for
their hospitality and for the opportunity to explore one of the fundamental challenges that
the current anthropological investment in the study of Europe poses both to the discipline
(on which see also Talal Asad et al., Provocations of European Ethnology, American Anthropologist 99 (1997): 71330) and to the concept of Europe itself. I also greatly appreciate
Nigel Rapports critical reading of an early draft.
1 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
2 Francois Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe: depuis la chute de lempire romain jusqua` la revolution francaise, 6th ed. (Paris: Didier, 1859) and Lhistoire de France
depuis les temps les plus recules jusquen 1789, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1872). For further
discussion see Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical
Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
534, 81.

139

140

MICHAEL HERZFELD

from official voluntaristic doctrines to the rantings of the far right. In

Quebec, as Richard Handler has shown, it underwrites the logic and
appeal of Francophone nationalism.3 In Australia its realization as a form
of egalitarian mateship is perhaps blunter in its gendered and racial
exclusivity,4 but for that reason exemplifies and illustrates the same basic
pattern. Thus exported, individualism has acquired a truly global significance: as the common sense of universalizing models of responsibility
and rationality, it precludes alternative visions of the relationship between
self and society. Like a virulently prolific lichen overwhelming the diversity
of an entire ecosystem, it threatens to overwhelm the variety of conceptual
and cultural logics existing in the world today.5
Anthropology can provide some useful ways of taking a critical step
back from this stifling situation, by showing how such values become
incorporatedthat is, quite literally, embodiedin the practices of everyday life, reducing the space for alternative visions. It can also suggest ways
in which persistent forms of localism and resistance to official dogma can
subvert and refashion these dominant ideas to the point where the official
ideology may emerge as a serious misrepresentation of large segments of
the popular imagination.
This is a crucial point. If the nation-state is an imagined community,
grounded in an idealized notion of national character and the modal
national self, it would be wise to ask whose imagination it is that we are
discussing.6 The vision of the nation-state promulgated by elites may not
be profoundly shared by most citizens even though they may speak of
the nation using exactly the same language and imagery.7 I emphasize
this last point because many theorists of nationalism have fallen prey
to a semiotic delusion in which the appearance of a common code has
been allowed to suggest the existence of a corresponding commonality of
intent.8
3
4

5
6
7
8

Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political
Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988),
15861; see also Judith Kapferer, Being All Equal: Identity, Difference and Australian
Cultural Practice (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 231.
James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xiii.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
See the discussion in Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the NationState (New York: Routledge, 1997), 302.
The problem of intentionality is especially acute for studies of nationalism. Psychological explanations do not get us very far. Thus, for example, one might read Andersons

The European Self

141

Even leaving aside the methodological and epistemological question of

how one would ever establish empirically that uniformity of hearts and
minds really existed, even at the level of collective representation there is
considerable variation among groups of citizens in their interpretation of
the significance, viability, and appropriate forms of nationhood. Indeed, as
Anthony Cohen has suggested, the success of nationalist ideology largely
depends on its ability to appeal to and encompass highly personal visions
of national identity.9
The irony is that this is exactly what an individualistic worldview
would logically entail. Perhaps all the worlds nationalisms are individualistic in this sense? At the very least, we should not assume that this
is an exclusively European characteristic or that it is characteristic of all
Europeans. If we are to work with such psychological models as imagination, and especially if we start out with the idea that those who do the
imagining are individualists, we logically must entertain the possibility
of multipleand often mutually contradictoryimages and interpretations. Moreover, the point applies to a whole range of psychologistic explanations of the persistence of strong nationalistic ideologies, from Alan
Dundess attribution of national inferiority complexes to Liah Greenfields
notably less condescending but equally reductionist delineation of ressentiment as the crucial motivating force of nationalism.10 If these models
are allowed to stand in their undifferentiated forms, they mechanistically reproduce as universal the rhetoric of resentment that many nationalisms employ. In other words, they represent the nation as a collectivity
in psychological terms: all its constituent hearts beat as one. This not
only entails a loss of critical purchase; it is also implausible and obviously
inaccurate.

9
10

argument (see note 6 above), or Liah Greenfields invocation of ressentiment to

explain the emergence of nationalist solidarity (Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1517), as more or less adequate accounts
of elite projections of sentiment, but they do not explain the willingness of ordinary people to accept, or at least acquiesce in, the logic of self-sacrifice that nationalism demands
at moments of extreme crisis.
Anthony P. Cohen, Personal Nationalism: A Scottish View of Some Rites, Rights, and
Wrongs, American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 80215.
Greenfield, Nationalism. Greenfields model might perhaps be recast in less reductionistic
terms, but Dundess neo-Freudian approach leaves little space for such reformulation; see
his Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A Reconsider
ation of Ossian, the Kinder- und Hausmarchen,
the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan, Journal
of Folklore Research 22 (1985): 518. Here the reductively psychologistic explanation
of fakelorea term that ignores the internal logic of participation in a national
cultureobscures the complex dynamics of cultural hierarchy, including, ironically, its
psychological aspects.

142

M ICHAEL H ERZFELD
THE MENTALITY TRAP

Key to this discussion, then, is the identification of a persistent confusion in the concept of mentality between the object of our analysis
the rhetoric of national and pan-European identityand the instrument
through which we carry it out. All the models of national homogeneity
are grounded in some notion of mentality. This, again, is a concept
of dubious analytic power. Especially significant for this critique is the
fact that mentality has long been a key term of nationalistic discourse,
from which it has filtered into popular usage throughout Europe.11 Its
use in scholarly discussion thus replicates the confusion between analytic
instrument and object of analysis.
Individualism and mentality are both products of a particular kind of
essentializing discourse. Individualism sometimes appears as programs of
political philosophymost notoriously in Margaret Thatchers declaration that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. In Europe
individualism has a long history. In the nineteenth century it was already
used to separate specific kinds of regional mentality into more and
less European versions. Indeed, Dora dIstrias declaration, so pleasant to the ears of the Western-supported Greek elite, that the Greeks had
escaped the somehow communistic influence of the Slavs finely illustrates the role of individualism in the global hierarchy of value that came
into existence in the great colonial empires.12
The political denial of the socialThatchers remark illustrates this
wellmasks the fundamentally social nature of dogmatic forms of individualism, whether methodological or political. In fact, those who write
about the social, especially in an era that emphasizes practice, are more
concerned with the role of individuals in reinterpreting and refashioning
the polity than are their opponents. Anthony Cohen, an early and distinguished practitioner of ethnography in European societies (in Scotland),
has argued that most accounts of nationalism do not explain why people
follow its prescriptions to such an impressive degree. 13 And his plea for
an awareness of the self is specifically couched in terms of a critique of
Thatcherism.14
11
12

13
14

In Greece, for example, the concept of nootrop

a (mentality) is widely adopted as an
explanation of alleged national traits and actions.
Dora dIstria, La nationalite hellenique dapr`es les chants populaires, Revue des Deux
Mondes 70 (1867): 590. See also my discussion in Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology,
and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 5661.
Cohen, Personal Nationalism, 8067.
Anthony P. Cohen, Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1994), 1716.

The European Self

143

In different but mutually complementary ways, Cohen and I both want

to disengage the dominant tradition in social history and anthropology
from the essentialism to which even its most resolutely constructivist approaches often fall prey. The problem, ironically, is most strikingly seen
in the Marxist arguments of Hobsbawn and Rangers in their edited volume The Invention of Tradition.15 These authors have effectively ignored
the ways in which ordinary people recast what their leaders tell them
about their national identity. Yet perhaps this is not surprising: taking the
orthodox view that ideology is a mystification always imposed from
above, Hobsbawm in particular has treated people (from social bandits
to the members of emergent nation-states) as dupes of imposed systems
of thought, rather than as individuals capable of reworking such ideologies to their own individual and collective ends. That capability can be
investigated only through a painstaking ethnographic as well as historical study of those involved in the process; a rare example is the late
Jerome R. Mintzs subtle and revealing retrospective study of a group
of peasant Anarchists who achieved a heroic notoriety in preCivil War
Spain.16
It is this capacity to recast the wisdom received from above that
Cohen, in the context of Scottish politics, calls personal nationalism.
This model extends the argument he offers in Self Consciousness: the
sociocentrism of the Durkheimian mainstream in anthropology has
subverted our awareness of the different ways in which people experience collective belonging. In his essay on personal nationalism Cohen
wisely reduces the emphasis on experience in order to focus on something more accessible empirically: the pragmatic ways in which, no doubt
as a result of experience in all its inevitable diversity, people recast the
official images of nationalistic ideology. Their uses of that ideology allow them to carve out personal maneuvering space within the collective,
whether a Thatcherite Tory world or an orthodox Marxist vision of the
world.
It might be argued that Cohen is simply reproducing the European ideology of individualism and that he is countering Durkheimian sociocentrism
15
16

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Jerome R. Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982). Mintz (pp. 2716) takes issue with an earlier argument of Eric Hobsbawms
concerning the causes of the Casas Viejas uprising. His objection is essentially the same
as my disagreement with the later work: Marxist-evolutionary models fail to recognize
the agency and perspectives of local actors in social groups they place at an early point
on the evolutionary scale.

144

M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

with its old nemesis, methodological individualism. But that would exemplify the sort of mischief that Cohen is attacking. Methodological
individualism, in political terms, is precisely the abandonment of the social
that characterizes the philosophy and practice of Thatcherism. Cohens
aim is quite the reverse: to recognize the capacity of ordinary social actors
to recast and reconfigure received orthodoxies. The Thatcherite agenda,
as Cohen notes, was quite different. It was to destroy the very possibility of
agency by emasculating the social in favor of a centralized and centralizing
ideology of personal autonomy.
At the other edge of Europe, and especially during periods of relatively
conservative rule, we find the same tactic in use. Greek politicians claim
that provincial artisans are craftspeople who treasure their originality
and so will not submit to the oriental love of soulless homogeneity, but
that they are indeed so oriental in their willful refusal to standardize
the products of their labor that they must be led bypredictablythese
same politicians. Another and very germane version of this argument is
that Greeks are wonderfully independent people who represent the true
Greek (and therefore European) love of freedom, but that these same
virtues, recast as selfish atomism and familism, are the ineradicable marks
of the Turkish stain on their collective character, which debars them from
the right to collectivize or unionize.17
Cohens argument allows us to work away from generalizations about
individualism and toward a clearer sense of what cultural features such
stereotypes invoke and why they might prove appealing to particular segments of a population. Who has an interest in promoting the idea that
there is a distinctively European self and under what conditions? Which
elements in this stereotype appear to be constant, and which are contested? How do these localized usages articulate with nationalistic and
regional identity politics and ideologies, and how do individual actors
deploy the rhetorics of these ideologies for more immediate practical
ends? I will not try to answer all these questions here. Instead, I will
sketch by example the kind of empirical research that is needed to answer
them.

17

See my article It Takes One to Know One: Collective Resentment and Mutual Recognition among Greeks in Local and Global Contexts, in Richard Fardon, ed., Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), 12442;
and The Aesthetics of Individualism: Artisanship, Business, and the State in Greece
(paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
Washington, D.C., 1997). The research for these papers was funded by the National
Science Foundation (award # 9307421).

The European Self

145

A VIEW FROM THE MARGINS

The idea of Europe has percolated through the complex populations of

the European continent and is refracted through the prism of daily
interactions.18 The task of understanding the ways in which this has
occurred can perhaps be best performed, as through a magnifying lens,
in the geographical and political margins of Europe. Even in the most
formal sense, European colonialism was by no means confined to nonEuropean peoples. The British domination of Malta and Cyprus (and
briefly of the Ionian Islands in Greece) attests otherwise. That pattern is
reproducedand was technically perfectedin the English domination
of Scotland and Ireland; one might also wish to consider the internal dynamics of regional power in Franquista Spain.19 The consequences linger
on: in Cyprus, for example, as Vassos Argyrou has demonstrated, littering
is a trivial but deeply pervasive activity that expresses deep discontent
discontent, that is, with the postcolonial perpetuation of elite control in
ways that will be immediately familiar to Africanists and others. 20 The
Soviet domination of much of Eastern and Central Europe offers another
instructive example.21 Greece exemplifies a place and a people forced to
internalize the categorical obsession with separating the West from the
Rest. The case of Greece illustrates the pain visited on the weak by the
strongpain passed down internally to minorities whose very existence is
denied.22
Europeanist anthropologists today do not confine their attentions to
the obviously exotic or picturesque corners of the continent. Rather they
have turned the tables of exoticism on the familiar. John Borneman, for
instance, has treated the family law provisions obtaining in pre-1989
East and West Berlin as the intricate kinship dynamic of two paired
18

19

20
21

22

Federico Chabod, Storia dellidea dellEuropa (Bari: Laterza, edition by Ernesto Sestan
and Armando Saitta, 1964). See also E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1956), 11718, 196.
Jane Nadel-Klein, Reweaving the Fringe: Localism, Tradition, and Representation in
British Ethnography, American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 50017. See also Isidoro Moreno
Navarro, La antropologa en Andalucia: desarollo historico y estado actual de las investigaciones, Ethnica 1 (1971): 10944.
Vassos Argyrou, Keep Cyprus Clean: Littering, Pollution, and Otherness, Cultural
Anthropology 12 (1996): 15978.
It is nevertheless important to avoid becoming entrapped in the hermetic logic of evil
empire scenarios, which are often no less essentialist than the ideologies at which they
are directed. For a sophisticated retrospective view of the Soviet sphere, see especially
Katherine Verdery, Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the Transition, American
Ethnologist 18 (1991): 219439; idem, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 778.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

moieties.23 Stacia Zabusky has examined the fashioning of cultural idioms

of communication in the European Space Agency in the Netherlands.24 I
have applied Mary Douglass analysis of the symbolism of pollution and
taboo to bureaucratic practices throughout Europe, an argument that has
been extended to the global reach of the United Nations refugee agency,
and Robert Hayden has applied this argument in detail to the horrors of
ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.25 Jacqueline Urlas work on
Western phenomenafrom statistics to Barbie dollssimilarly raises
the question of why we fail to see ourselves as no less symbolically
grounded than the people we study in supposedly exotic places.26 Miner,
in an instructive joke in the 1956 American Anthropologist, tackles the
bizarre body purifications before the bathroom mirror of the Nacirema,
who are none other than Americans spelled backwards. Among the new
defamiliarizations of the West, playing with familiar images in this fashion
offers an effective way of bearding exoticism in its lair as well as a useful
analytic strategy. 27 The ability this strategy gives us to examine our everyday assumptions is invaluable: the anthropological analysis of European
(and European-derived) societies and cultures both enriches the comparative purview of anthropology and offers a valuable corrective to the selfconfirming tendencies of disciplines that for too long have been hostage to
the hitherto unchallenged sway of Eurocentric perceptions.28 As Deborah
23
24
25

26

27
28

John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34.
Stacia E. Zabusky, Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in
Space Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
The model is provided by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts
of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). See also Michael N.
Barnett, The U.N. Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda, Cultural
Anthropology 12 (1997): 55178; Robert Hayden, Imagined Communities and Real
Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia, American Ethnologist
23 (1996): 783801; Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring
the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Oxford: Berg, 1992). For a comparable use
of Douglass model in an African and international setting, see Liisa Malkki, Purity and
Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Jacqueline Urla, Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations, and the
Making of Basque Identity, American Ethnologist 20 (1993): 81842; Jacqueline Urla
and Alan Swedlund, The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine
Body in Popular Culture, in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., Deviant Bodies:
Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 278313.
Horace Miner, Body Ritual among the Nacirema, American Anthropologist 58 (1956):
5037.
Some social science discourse curiously essentializes the West in ways that reproduce the fundamentalisms against which they are directed. See especially Samuel P.
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of Word Order (New York:

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147

Reed-Danahay has noted for Pierre Bourdieu, and as we might equally

observe with respect to Louis Dumont, the conflation of all Europeans as
essentially individualistic is empirically unpersuasive. It also, perversely,
allows Westerners to be differentiated among themselves in distinction to
all othersa key component of nineteenth-century arguments for their
own superiority.29
The advantage of working in Greece, or in other less mainstream
European sites, is that this defamiliarizing tension between being European and being other than European is already in placeindeed, is a
staple of everyday conversation and media attention.30 One constant challenge to easy assumptions lies in the apparent lack of fit between Greece
qua the Europeans spiritual cradle and Greece qua the orientalized bad
child of the European Union.31
It is important to understand what such examples can tell us. First, and
foremost, they are not about typicality, a statistical concept that implies
the possibility of essentialist definitions. Typicality is fine fodder for tourist
advertisingtypical Italian style, Greek hospitality, and the likebut it
makes for poor analysis when the object is to probe beyond stereotypes,
or to ask who uses the stereotypes, for what purposes, and under what circumstances. Greek notions of selfhood are no more typical of Europe
than the swashbuckling Cretan sheep thieves with whom I have worked
are typical of Greece. Recourse to extreme (or, indeed, marginal) cases
allows us to argue a fortiori that the more diffuse instances of related
values and forms of action provide some commonality throughout the
larger area. Moreover, the salience of these extreme or marginal examples may be locally recognized, as when Greek nationalists uphold the
swashbuckling freebootery of the kleftes (thieves)the historic heroes
of the national struggle for independenceas redolent of the national
passion for freedom; or when the same Greek nationalists claim to be the
last true individualists.

29
30

31

Simon and Schuster, 1995). For a discussion of occidentalism as a global phenomenon,

see James G. Carrier, ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995). For a thoughtful disquisition on some of the implications of existing essentialisms,
see Fernando Coronil, Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories, Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 5187.
Deborah Reed-Danahay, The Kabyle and the French: Occidentalism in Bourdieus Theory of Practice, in Carrier, ed., Occidentalism, 6184.
Michael Herzfeld, Productive Discomfort: Anthropological Fieldwork and the Dislocation of Etiquette, in Marjorie Garber, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, and Paul B. Franklin, eds.,
Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 4151.
This is fundamentally the argument I developed in Anthropology through the LookingGlass.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

It is no coincidence, and indeed represents a classic illustration of the

self-confirming properties of hegemony, that such glorifications of rebellion act to confirm outsiders judgment of the Greeks as unreliable. In the
same way the most ardent advocates of the individualism of the market
economy are the quickest to condemn the Greeks for their uncooperative
stance toward European Union regulation, and the most fervid nationalists are the quickest to claim, at one and the same time, that minority or
marginal populations are the purest representatives of the majoritarian
nationeven as they accuse these groups of forming a treacherous fifth
column or of betraying the ideals of national pride. The authorities are
heirs to a dilemma born of their own emergence from a liberation struggle. The mantle of past insubordination sits uneasily on the shoulders of
those who must now wield power. It is in this context that the yoking
of a European mentality with models of individualism and the love of
freedom becomes both an urgent task and a highly problematic one for
the more authoritarian of European leaderships.
For all these reasons, we must view claims about the existence of a
peculiarly European selfhood with deep skepticism. Occidentalism may
be a reaction to orientalism, but it often serves the same ends; it is the
other side of the same coin.32 Analytically, we must shift the focus away
from a putative European character or mentality and toward the uses to
which such claims are made and contested by local actors.33 This is a tactic
that satisfies both the logical argument against confusing the object with
the instrument of study and the anthropological insistence on examining
elites and subalterns within a common framework of comparison.
CONTESTING THE CLAIMS OF RATIONALISM

Closely associated with the view that Europeans were individualists is

an intellectualist rendition of the same argumentnamely, that, unlike
natives, Europeans think for themselves and thus have exclusive claims
on rationality.34 One rendition of this view is that European thought is
literal, whereas that of all other human beings is merely metaphorical. Despite the widespread recognition of the metaphorical basis of scientific and other forms of reasoning, initiated by Giambattista Vico in
the mid-eighteenth century and elaborated by thinkers from Max Black
32
33
34

See James G. Carrier, Introduction, in Occidentalism, esp. 16.

This position is consistent with both practice theory in contemporary anthropology
and sociology and concepts of use (or action) in the study of language.
There is an implicit homology in this kind of thinking: that they are to us as passivity is
to activity. Such binary discourses have long underwritten colonial and neocolonialist
enterprises; for a discussion, see my Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, 829.

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149

in the 1960s to the more recent analyses of George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, the equation of literalness with European industrial rationality
persists.35
Yet it has also been attacked at its very roots, in a remarkable reexamination of the ancient roots through which European rationalism usually
seeks legitimation. The Classicist G. E. R. Lloyd critically addresses the
concept of mentalite in European thought. He suggests that the distinction between a rational European us and a prelogical, alien them
(which reached its apogee in the writings of Lucien Levy-Bruhl) has its
origins in the litigious practices of the ancient Athenian marketplace.
There, in a fashion not unfamiliar in an election year in modern industrial
democracies, contestants called their own arguments literal and dismissed
those of their opponents as mere metaphor.36
The genius of Lloyds insight is that it shows historically how ideas
can take on the force of logical abstraction even thoughor perhaps
becausethey are grounded in the social environments that their exponents seek to govern. We live in a world in which our own forebears have
shaped relations of power that invest the contingent with the force of
eternal verity. Those who resist are often silenced. I find it revealing that
in Bertrand Russells magisterial History of Western Philosophy, a work
whose hero is surely Rene Descartes, Descartess gadfly Giambattista Vico
does not even rate an entry in the index.37
The Cartesian agenda was adopted as the touchstone of differentiation
between colonizing Europeans and colonized natives. Moreover, as a
motivating and shaping force in the construction of the colonial habitus, it reinforced the self-fulfilling properties of this stereotypical division.
Paul Rabinow has shown how the march of colonial building in French
Morocco adopted Cartesian principles of town planning in contrast to the
native mode of architecture. He has also pointed out the engagement
of social theorists of the Annee sociologique school in this programa
salutary warning of the ever-lurking risk of cooptation.38 Note that these
theorists were founders of the sociocentric tradition that Cohen attacks
in his formulation of personal nationalism.
35

36

37
38

Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1962); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910); G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945).
Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD
THE EVERYDAY USE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER

National character permits nationalisms to ignore or suppress any

evidence of internal differentiation. It is perhaps not so much a myth,
as Julio Caro Baroja has called it, as a device that serves the homogenizing
imperatives of nation-state policy.39 Indeed, when one hears Greeks declaiming that all Greeks are freedom-lovers, that all Greeks are masters
of their own destiny, and that all Greeks are hospitable, one might well
think the official discourse had utterly permeated their hearts and minds.
As discoursethe external codeit has certainly been successful.
Listening to such declarations, however, one often hears otherequally
sweepingkinds of generic assertions that do not sit comfortably with
the official rhetoric: that all Greeks are unreliable, tempestuous, quick to
anger, underhanded and deceitful, full of low cunning (poniri), and unwilling to submit to law and order. Indeed, such stereotypes have sometimes been coopted by the authorities. For example, the military regime
of 196774 declared that the rebellious character of the Greeks deserved
a strong disciplinary hand, a sentiment echoed by its supporters in their
everyday speech. This was perhaps the closest that any Greek government
came to an open admission of traits thought best kept confined within the
national domestic space. The regime even prohibited the smashing of
plates at the feet of dancers because, it was said, this was both dangerous
and a disgraceful vision of the Greek self before the scandalized eyes of
foreigners.
Unflattering self-stereotypes do not tell us very much about what Greeks
are really like, any more than do positive characterizations voiced by the
authorities (or by ordinary civilians to foreigners they do not know intimately). But they do tell us something very important: the basis of
sociability among Greeks may be contrary to official ideas, yet essential to national cohesion. What is said in the house should not be said
in the public place, goes the old saw, but what is said in the house
provides the day-to-day sense of commonality necessary to national viability and, at the same time, a resource for conceptualizing opposition
to those who happen to be in power. This relativity of access, at many
different levels (nation, region, village, kin group), demarcates insiders
from outsiders; and it is here that questions of essentialized, collective
character become important as resources in the defense of those same
boundaries.40
39
40

Julio Caro Baroja, El mito del caracter nacional: meditaciones a contrapelo (Madrid:
Seminarios y Ediciones, 1970).
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 28.

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151

The idea of national character, like that of mentalite, is part of the

prevailing vocabulary of everyday nationalism in most European countries (and for that reason is directly comparable to phenomena reported
from many non-European sources). The idea had a long history in
American anthropology as well (witness the work of Ruth Benedict on
Japan, to take only the most famous example). The habit of pontificating
about whole populations as though they moved and thought as one
The Nuer, for exampleis not confined to the study of so-called exotic
peoples.41 It is just as prevalent in the study of The Italians, The Greeks,
and so forth: these are the actual titles of widely read books. It is also part
of the language of official nationalism.42
Cohens exploration of personal nationalism provides a welcome and
provocative opportunity to free ourselves from an analytic strategy that
properly belongs to the official discourses we study. As he notes, a structural approach renders . . . individuals as merely members of . . . collectivities, and in so doing, posits a qualitative difference between them and
us: they are satisfactorily generalizable; we are preciously individualistic.
There is a remarkable irony in the fact that it is a Europeanist who arrives
at this conclusion on the basis, in part, of accounts of European nationalism, a point that I think reinforces Cohens argument. He continues: We
have been complicit in the colonization, massification, or anonymization of the human subject. Recognizing the role of the individual crossculturally is a step toward liberating ourselves from such a superior and
narrow field of vision.43 There are risks in such an approach, to be sure,
not the least of which is that of backsliding into a solipsistic methodological individualism or some degree of psychological reductionism. But
Cohen is right to suggest that at the very least we can learn something from
a nationalism, articulate about its intended relationship with individual
needs and desires, that in turn is expressed in a variety of ways by a variety
of informants.
41

42

43

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). For quite varied
critiques of this usage, see especially James Clifford, On Ethnographic Authority, Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 11846; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Richard
Handler, On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism
and Ethnicity, Journal of Anthropological Research 41 (1985): 17182.
See, for example, Luigi Barzini, The Italians, 1st American ed. (New York: Atheneum,
1964) and H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks (London: Penguin Books, 1951). Kittos book is
exclusively about ancient Greeks. See also A. R. Burn, The Modern Greeks (London:
J. T. Nelson, 1944). Note the significantly different title of Burns book, written by a
classical historian: unless otherwise advised, readers should always assume that Greeks
are ancient!
Cohen, Personal Nationalism, 2.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

The apparent contradiction between individualism and the nation-state

teleology that demands conformism in matters of identity can be resolved
in at least three ways. First, state representations of individualism are
undeniably social prescriptions.44 Second, the anthropological convention that opposed state structures to segmentary polities is misleading,
in that nation-states are administratively and conceptually arranged in
hierarchically ranked tiers of mutually opposed subunits; the convention
itself is an example of segmentary logic (pitting them against us) at
the broadest level of differentiation. Third, the reification of culture as
a national possession renders it immediately analogous to land, which
is always divisible as private property even though territorial integrity
justifies its defense in times of war. The literature of many European (and
other) countries is replete with stirring tales of homes and fields, privately
owned, providing the very basis of the emotional appeal that inspired
citizens to acts of patriotic heroism.45
The representation of culture as a kind of property requires further
elaboration. Here, following the lead of Richard Handlers perceptive
treatment of Quebecois nationalism, we can usefully turn to Macphersons notion of possessive individualism.46 Handlers argument is in
effect that the concept of a person individuated by the possession of
property provided a model for the collective self of the nation. That self
ownsor hasland. Above all, however, it has culture. The progressive reification of culture, in a move that places nationalism and anthropology on parallel trajectories, thus makes the heritagein Quebec,
the patrimoinean object of proprietary defense. It is surely no coincidence that, in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet hegemony, numerous
nationalismsall eager to enjoy the new pleasures of untrammeled selfexpressionseized on various mutant forms of cultural anthropology as
their primary source of scholarly legitimation, much as their predecessors
had turned to folklore.
But this new possession often turns out to be a surprisingly unmanageable thing. Owning a national culture meant that one could find in it
all the virtues that had created the new nation-state: heroism, a love of

44

45
46

As is, for example, official teleology. See Shaun Kingsley Malarney, The Limits of State
Functionalism and the Reconstruction of Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Northern
Vietnam, American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 54060.
See Michael Herzfeld, Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of
Andreas Nenedakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 84.
Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture; Macpherson, Political Theory of
Possessive Individualism.

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153

independence, a stubborn resistance to authority. All these are richly celebrated in poetry, opera, and visual art. They are also part of the historical
indoctrination of every schoolchild. But there a paradox arises, one that
reproduces in mythopoeic terms the paradox underlying the genesis of the
nation-state. As Edmund Leach pointed out, the human race arose from
the incestuous union of Adam and Eve, but thenceforward it was committed to strict rules against incurring such pollution ever again.47 Similarly,
nation-states are created out of a miscegenation the repetition of which
must be debarred by the logic of national purity. The list is extensive:
France, offspring of Germanic Franks and Celtic Gauls; England, crossroads of Saxons and Normans (to name but a few); Greece, where the
constant infusion of Saracen ancestry became the subject of a national
epic created out of a set of songs and medieval manuscripts virtually at
the behest of nationalistic scholars, and where the most hotly denied cultural affinities seem to furnish the most intimate images of typical Greek
culture.48 Italy, more subject to localist sentiment than many countries,
openly paraded the paradox in dAzeglios often-quoted dictum: Now
that Italy has been made, we need to make the Italians.
These parentages, moreover, seem to be reproduced as politics in a
tense marriage of order and disorder in which the side of disorder always
remains a potent presence. The Greek revolution was carried forward by
kleftes, whose contempt for authority provides a model for a continuing disrespect for the national government, successor to the Turks in the
popular imagination; many of the kleftes were speakers of Koutsovlach,
Turkish, and other languages that today mark minority identities that the
bearers of official policy refuse to acknowledge.49 Robin Hoods standing remains so great in England that a decision by a group of Thatcherite
Nottingham promoters to have him unfrocked as the towns official
symbol drew howls of outrage from local residents and the national
media.50 Americans image of themselves as rebels who humiliated the
tax-levying English at the Boston Tea Party is reenacted in every confrontation with the Internal Revenue Servicean everyday social drama that
47

48
49
50

E. R. Leach, Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden: An Examination of Some Recent Developments in the Analysis of Myth, in E. N. Hayes and T. Hayes, eds., Claude Levi-Strauss:
The Anthropologist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 4760.
See Greenfield, Nationalism, 914; Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 120.
Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 5874.
See especially Andre Pierce, Sheriff of Nottingham Banishes Robin at Last, The
Times (London), March 26, 1996, Home News; Martin Wainwright, Nottingham
Sheriff Springs to Robins Aid, Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 31, 1996, UK
News, 11.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

perversely provides some of the experiential, as opposed to discursive,

basis for the sense of national identity among a people of explicitly
heterogeneous origins (e pluribus unum).51
The case of Robin Hood is quite revealing in this respect. The
Nottingham Partnership, a civic and corporate association, decided in
March 1996 that Robin Hood was the wrong symbol for a city devoted
to attracting investment and trade on a large scale. The counterattack was
led, ironically, by the current Sheriff of Nottingham, heir to the mantle
of opposition to Robin in medieval times but at this point a respected
Labour Party councillor. The struggle reveals how tenacious the ideology of antiauthoritarianism could be on both sides: the Thatcherites invoked individualistic prowess, while their opponents held high the banner
of local autonomy and social consciencea clear invocation of individualistic ideals to refute the Tories rejection of the very idea of the
social.
In this debate we see that the common ground of the two mutually
opposed political camps is indeed some notion of individualism. The debate parallels an old battle within the social sciences, that between a
Durkheimian sociocentrism and a much more atomistic idiom usually described as methodological individualism. This has important implications as we follow Cohens argument about nationalism. Cohen wants
us to consider what nationalism means for those who must carry its
standardwhat it means for them as people, rather than as ciphers to
an impersonal cultural account. This is not so much a retreat to psychology as a recognition that nationalism can work only by persuading its
adherents to map their sense of an individuated self onto the collective
to accept (whether they believe it or not) that their very individuation
is what renders their collective identity special.52
Such paradoxes abound because nation-states that grew out of acts of
rebellion must find ways of legitimizing their newfound authority. This
is not a peculiarly European phenomenon; indeed, it has been largely
forgotten in the West, a fact that marks the successful completion of the
process. Some Western media representations of new Third World nations
as inherently unstable occlude the familiarity to Europeans of precisely
this pattern: rebellion is not easily routinized as everyday bureaucratic
51

52

On social dramas, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action
in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); on their reproduction in
everyday life, see Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 143.
For anthropologists, belief is not an appropriate category of analysis here. The issue is
one of adherence to social convention (a social fact) rather than what people actually
think (a psychological one).

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procedure. Yet this is what must happen if a nationalist revolution is to

consolidate its success.
Moreover, the idea that the members of European nations are collectively more individualistic than other peoples is contradicted at base. The
Greeks, asked to perform the role of aboriginal Europeans, were nonetheless forced to do so in a passive way in obedience to the dictates of Great
Power politics and philology. Everything that seemed most familiar in
their everyday lives was represented by the national elite as foreign to
the duly essentialized Hellenic character, and as such debarred to ordinary
Greeks through authoritarian schooling and an aggressive cultural program sustained by successive central governments.53 This vision of Greek
society has proved durable and pervasive, even among those who have
been generally critical of the Western-imposed model of Hellenism. Thus,
for example, Martin Bernalwhose Black Athena infuriated many in the
Greek elite precisely because it suggested that their culture had not
been autochthonously generated in ancient timesneglects to describe
the impact of this same ideology on the Greeks of today, an impact that
is perfectly reproduced by the hostile reception of his book! By neglecting
to tackle the modern Greeks predicament head-on, Bernal inadvertently
reinforces their persistent marginality to the project of investing Europe
with a classical pedigree.54 It leaves them the passive victims of a history
made for them by more powerful forces.
Yet their response to those attempts was to try to take control of their
own history. They read the resurrection of Hellas that began in 1821
as a clarion call to irredentism in blatant defiance of the Great Powers:
hence the Great Idea that led them to attempt the disastrous adventure
in Asia Minor in 19202. Their self-assertion arose, not, I suggest, because
of some European quintessence that predetermined their actions, but because their leaders were bluff and practical souls who thought they saw
the main chanceand (at least in the person of the folklorist Nikolaos
Politis) understood what a drag on their ambitions the persistent and
orientalist charge of fatalism would be: his and his colleagues patriotic
reworkings of vernacular texts were hardly devoid of agency and represented an attempt to take charge of a history stolen from the Greeks, so
53

54

Thus the Hellenic model, a largely foreign-derived idealization of ancient culture, came
to predominate in official discourse (and to some extent in everyday perceptions) over
the Romeic. Comprised of familiar cultural items, the Romeic model was regarded
as foreign because it was both Roman (an allusion to the status of Byzantium as
the capital of the eastern Roman empire) and, more seriously, Turkish. See Herzfeld,
Ours Once More, and Anthropology through the Looking-Glass.
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

they had deduced from the master narrative of Western philosophy, by the
Western powers themselves.55 While the Greek leaders saw this development as a claim on European identity, it provides the historical backdrop
against which they learned to suppress internal self-assertion by local and
minority populations by insisting on the illegality of rebellion but also
of minoritarian politics.56 In other words, the European individualism
and love of freedom entailed in the genesis of the nation-state became
oriental or Turkish whenever it appeared as subsequent rebellion,
cultural or political, from within. To the extent that the Greek leadership could assume a European mantle, it could also deny the European
claims of those who dared disobey its dictates at home.
But there is another side to this proactive stance. Because it entails
standing up to those who would dub the Greeks as fatalists, thereby disproving the charge, it entails actionsfrom the recasting of folklore to
uncooperative acts in international councilsthat serve to confirm the
negative aspects of this Greek individualism for those who wish to force
the country into compliance. At the height of the Macedonian crisis, an
demanded an end to such selfarticle in the Athens daily Eleftherotipia
confirming hegemony: Since, dear friends and allies, the greatest newspapers of England, the U.S.A., but also of France and Germany have used
ad nauseam negative adjectives to dub our tactic on the Skopje issue as
unjustified (!), very often calling our policy by the Greek-derived words
paranoic, hysteric, myopic, we reply to you that when you discover and
incorporate into the vocabulary of your languages words that render the
sense of the Greek words paranoic, hysteric, and myopic, then you will
be able to understand even our curious sensitivity on the matter of the
name of Skopje.57 As a proactive response to international bullying, this
may have made fine copy at home. But it is because Greece is a country
55

56

57

Handler, Nationalism. The folklorists evidently saw their interventions in the content of
texts as a reassertion of agency in the face of Western overlordship. By adhering to the
classicizing conventions of the protectorate powers, however, they found themselves
caught in the usual traps of hegemony. If they failed to adhere to this line, they were
condemned as unpatriotic or un-European.
See Adamantia Pollis, Greek National Identity: Religious Minorities, Rights, and
European Norms, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10 (1992): 17195; Stephanos
Stavros, The Legal Status of Minorities in Greece Today: The Adequacy of their Protection in the Light of Current Human Rights Perceptions, Journal of Modern Greek
Studies 13 (1995): 132.
Sakis Lefas, I Skopian, i eteri mas, ki i istora mas, Eleftherotipa, March 2, 1994, 46.
This is an example of what A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson called political philology.
See Wace and Thompson, The Nomads of the Balkans (London: Methuen, 1914), 9.
See also Michael Herzfeld, Political Philology: Everyday Consequences of Grandiose
Grammars, Anthropological Linguistics 39 (1997): 35175.

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taught by tutelary powers (the allies of the article) that its ability to
gain and keep international respect depends on its success in reproducing
the ancient glories, etymology and all. In that larger international context,
however, the article also appears to confirm the stereotype of the Greeks as
unreasoning chauvinists who operate out of a ressentiment much like the
complex attributed by Dundes to the nationalistic folklorists. It thereby
illustrates perfectly the operation of hegemony at the most international
level. For, outside Greece, who would take such an argument seriously?

THE GREEK ATOMIST INDIVIDUALIST:

A PARADIGMATIC CASE

Greece dramatically embodies the tensions of European identity. At once

the spiritual ancestor and the orientalized client-state of the modern
European powers, it is both the idealized central source and the contested
border of Europe itself. As such, it reproduces a pattern of core-periphery
relations at the international level that are perhaps more easily observed
in the lower level relationship between a nation-state and its border regions. In the estimation of its self-appointed protectors, Greece is both the
guardian of a glorious tradition and beyond the pale of modernity. That
this is something of a caricature of the prevailing situationone that is
perpetuated to some extent by those segments of the elite that identify their
political interests with Western political and cultural powershould not
blind us to the painful, lived reality of this paradox for the Greeks of today.
Ideals of selfhood are subject to wildly divergent kinds of evaluation.
comExemplifying the range of possibilities, the concept of eghosmos,
monly glossed as self-regard, is a semantic doublet, capable of conveying both admiration for a supposedly European love of freedom and personal autonomy and contempt for the supposedly oriental characteristics

of boastfulness, atomism, and intractability.58 The concept of eghosmos

is enshrined in the national mythology: after independence, the successors
to the newly heroized kleftes were excoriated by the newly installed Greek
authorities as foreign bandits who had nothing to do with their glorious
precursors. This is not an uncommon pattern when liberation struggles
consolidate their bureaucratic and territorial authority. The salience of
the Greek case lies in the implications of a peculiar kind of selfhoodone
58

self-regard, remains that of J. K. Campbell,

Probably the best account of eghosmos,
Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek
Mountain Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

that historically represented the idealized nation but in the context of the
routines of bureaucratic statehood must be excluded from it.
is not a stable concept even in rural communities. For some
Eghosmos
villagers, especially for wealthier farmers, it is a destructive force; for others, notably for shepherds still engaged in competitive forms of masculine
self-aggrandizement (such as reciprocal theft), it is a virtueand one they
can now, with the smattering of education they have received from the
state, turn against the state by reminding its officers that the heroes of the
struggle for freedom were themselves thieves. Some Greek shepherds
also buy into a larger rhetoric by deriding some politicians as Turks,
either explicitly or otherwise. One could hardly wish for a clearer demonstration of the ways in which official ideology can be coopted for causes
quite contrary to the intentions of the state bureaucracy.59
as a positive virtue does not stop with
But the exaltation of eghosmos
these marginal shepherds. Not only do some farmers seem to engage in
than by any values of
actions that seem dictated more by eghosmos
cooperation, but businesspeople, academics, and officials of every kind
act in comparable ways. It is here that the analytic tactic I suggested earlier in this chapter becomes especially useful: to use the unfamiliar patterns
discerned in relatively remote rural communities heuristically as a way of
identifying modulations of the same values in social contexts in which
these patterns are more discrete or diffuse. James Faubion has done just
that. He uses a Weberian gloss of sovereignty to explain the persistence
in modern Athenian literary circlesprecisely, that is, in
of eghosmos
the spaces where, as he argues, a distinctively Greek modernity is being
forged.60
That Faubions effort was not appreciated by most Athenian intellectuals may be a measure of its perspicacity.61 It may well be the case that they
felt that their sovereignty was actually impugned by its being linked to
the values reported by ethnographers from the countryside rather than to
those of the cosmopolitan centers of Europe. Yet it is hard not to recognize
in accounts of academic, parliamentary, and business disputes some of the
same rhetorical devices, and much of the same concern with individual
59

60
61

In a Cretan highland village just before the 1981 elections, a villager who supported
the soon-to-be-victorious socialists told me that the people had already had 400 years
of the conservativesa clear allusion to the Turks and reminiscent of the bitter jibe
of Greeces first president, Capodistrias, at the uncooperative wealthy landowners as
Christian Turks.
See James Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12238.
To Vma, November 6, 1994, B 6.
V. Pesmazoglou, Me kremmdhia, parakalo,

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159

reputation, that one meets among shepherds and farmers. The ideology
that views the countryside as the repository of the national quintessence,
representative as it is of a larger pattern of West European romanticism,62
does not happily face the key consequence of that pedigree: Greek modernity may in some respects be radically different from the very models in
Western Europe with which its advocates most eagerly claim kinship.
of the rural population is a form of conIn one sense the eghosmos
formity. As the driving force of social contest, it can beand often is
assimilated to a capitalist ethos of competition.63 Competition differentiates individuals only insofar as it lures them with the promise of distinction; the fact that they are competing to acquire a commonly esteemed
advantage belies the distinctiveness of their respective motives. And the
modernist claim to despise such games, which we might expect to be
unique to the modern sphere as Anthony Giddens has described it, or
indeed as some ethnographers have found for its historical emergence
(for example, Jane Collier for Andalusia), has its roots in the contemptuous pride of rural actors.64 While the urban Greek intellectual may today
dispose of much greater ranges of choice and self-determination, there
is nevertheless an identifiable continuity with modes of action more dramatically described in the ethnographies of rural society. Indeed, Renee
Hirschon has made the extremely important point that the social and symbolic organization of domestic spacethe physical habitus, as it were
shows this continuity clearly. In more recent work she has also shown how
the transmission of agonistic modes of action is much the same among
urbanites as among rural dwellers.65 That perception is consistent with
the persistence of ideas about causation and responsibility, in forms distinctive to the Greek society, within that most modernist of projects, the
national bureaucracy.66
62

63

64

65

66

See, variously, Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London:
Croom Helm, 1978); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and
Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Nadel-Klein,
Reweaving the Fringe; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1973).
produced beneficial effects
In a mountain village on Crete, I was told that eghosmos
when it led to competitive commercial success, as in the extraordinary proliferation of
coffeehouses.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Jane Fishburne Collier, From Duty to Desire:
Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Renee Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees
in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Greek Adults Play, or, How to Train for
Caution, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10 (1992): 3556.
See my Social Production of Indifference, esp. 1223.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

None of this is to propose a deterministic model of culture, but simply

to argue that when people insist on the distinctiveness of their cultural
idioms, they may do so for better reasons than their reading of global
cultural hierarchy would lead them to want to admit. When, for example,
the most sophisticated Athenians continue to follow normative naming
practicesespecially that of naming the first son for his fathers father
they commonly invoke the superficially uncomplicated explanation of
traditiona justification that is nevertheless extremely familiar from
village practice.67 Urban elite parents may be able to exercise more direct
control over the choice of names than can their peasant counterparts,
who must often yield the choice to a powerful baptismal sponsor. Indeed,
they may be able to follow traditional prescriptions more closely than
the peasants ever could. But this claim of traditionality is by no means a
simple matter at all, and it is closely bound up with issues of selfhood.
When I originally submitted a study of Greek naming practices to an
onomastics journal, it was rejected on the basis of a brief report written by, I was informed, a native-born Greek. The latter contemptuously
dismissed my analysis of the regularity of name transmission, and my
discussion of the idea that name replication implied the resurrection
(anstasi) of antecedent eponyms, as just a custom and therefore not
worthy of scholarly dissection.68 Such corrections of foreigners interpretations are a common experience. They often represent metropolitan
resistance to outsiders having what some urbanites consider an unseemly
depth of knowledge of the rural culture.69 But I think more than a simple
defense of cultural intimacy was intended in the case of the names article. Rather, this was also a rejection of the idea that rural notions of the
self were significant in themselves, let alone when they occurred among
sophisticates. To understand why, we must briefly examine the further
ramifications of the naming system.
These have to do with two features, which, in order to underscore their
mutual relevance we can call material property and spiritual properties.

67

68

69

See Juliet du Boulay, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974), in which we find the expression e tsi to vrkame (thats how we found it) invoked by villagers to account for customs they may have fearedalthough she does
not raise this issueit might strike the visiting anthropologist as primitive or otherwise
undesirable.
This paper was eventually published as When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity, Journal of Anthropological Research 38
(1982): 288302.
On one occasion I was criticized for my Greek by a Greek-born copy editor in the United
States who failed to realize that the texts in question were in Cretan dialect.

The European Self

161

In the article in question, building on the work of Margaret Kenna and

others,70 I tried to demonstrate a systematic covariation between the rules
of name transmission and those of property inheritance in several parts of
Greece. I found that even the exceptional cases could largely be explained
in terms of the cosmology underlying this correspondence: the resurrection of a persona, enshrined in a name, is an act of reciprocity, and one
that creates a close spiritual connection between namesake and recipient.
Bernard Vernier, in an exhaustive study of ethnopsychology, inheritance,
and the rules of naming on the Dodecanesian island of Karpathos, has
shown that personal properties are also construed as following the same
logic, so that psychological and physical features are thought to be bilineally distributed in the same way as personal names and property.71 At
first glance it would appear that this is a system in which heredity, marked
by the transmission of the personal name and the property associated with
it, is locally considered to predetermine absolutely the personality of the
individual. Such a system would afford little play to anything like free
willa key component of the individualism envisaged by the ideologues
of pan-European identity.
Sometimes we do encounter creative reworkings of the basic principles
of name transmission, usually in connection with unusual arrangements
for the transfer of property or with the manipulation of powerful patrons
desire to perpetuate names from their own families. This suggests that the
ostensible rigidity of such a system permits a good deal of rearranging of
social relations, because it allows skilled actors to invoke general norms
in justification of specific exceptions. Although on Karpathos the range of
rearrangements may be more restricted than it is elsewhere, this lesser flexibility does not necessarily correspond to the facts on the ground. We
need only think of English-speaking parents arguing about which of them
their newborn baby takes after to realize that attributions of this kind,
invocations of natural resemblance that they are, are actually grounded in
social and cultural criteria. Iconicitythe semiotic relationship whereby
a signs meaning derives from its supposed resemblance to its referentis,
of necessity, always culturally contingent.72 Much is at stake in attributions of genetic resemblance: property, the perpetuation of a line, political
alliances.
70
71
72

Margaret E. Kenna, Houses, Fields, and Graves: Property and Ritual Obligation on a
Greek Island, Ethnology 15 (1976): 2134.
Bernard Vernier, La gen`ese sociale des sentiments: anes et cadets dans lle grecque de

Karpathos (Paris: Editions

de lEcole
des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, 1991).
See my extended discussion in Cultural Intimacy, 5673.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

Moreover, iconicity is the basis of Andersons model of the imagined

community.73 The members of this entity are presumed to be all alike. This
does not sit well with our usual ideas of individualism; but ideologues of
European and national identity, notably Francois Guizot, got around that
difficulty by arguing, in effect, that what made Europeans all alike was
their shared capacity for being different.74
Resemblance is relative in precisely this segmentary sense. This has
interesting consequences for the European claim to a uniquely individualistic character, refracted through the various subunits of nation, region,
community, and kin group. For just as a normative system of naming
poses challenges to individual uniquenessin the Greek system an act
of commemoration (resurrection) becomes, over several generations, a
means of deindividuationso the tensions between being a nation and
being European involve arguments about distinctiveness: can Danes pro
duce feta and ouzo,
or should the Americans be permitted to label their
sparkling wines Champagne? Can the European Union prevent the
Greeks from eating their beloved kokoretsi (stuffed and roasted tripe)
in the name of some collective desire to avert mad cow disease, or does
this Turkish-named delicacy (from Turkish kokorec) suddenly provide the
means of self-disaggregation from the homogenous culture allegedly propounded by the bureaucrats in Brussels and exemplified by their attempts
to regularize the shape of bananas and cucumbers for the purposes of
control?75
One might well suspect so: the much-maligned Turkish strain in Greek
culture becomes a means of asserting difference, but always at the price of
ridicule (not to speak of charges of anti-Hellenism!). For similar reasons,
we should not be surprised when the libertarian Adam Smith Institute
complains about the regulation from Brussels of condoms and cucumbers
as threatening to swamp the European ideal. Too bad that it was the
Portuguese love of carrot jam that led the commissioners to classify carrots
as a fruit; it was not the commissioners job, thought the critics, to impose
one nations standards on all the others.76
73
74
75
76

Ibid., 279.
This line of argument is not uniquely European, but ideologues like Guizot elaborated it
to an unusual degree of specificity in nineteenth-century Western Europe.
On the kokoretsi story, see Gutsy Greeks Fight to Save Delicacy, The Herald (Glasgow),
September 12, 1997, 14.
On the European Unions attempts to control the size and shape of bananas, see William
Miller, Boston Globe, September 22, 1994, 19. He reports that under the new rules a
banana must not be abnormally curved ). The article also reports earlier attempts to
ban the curved cucumber and to classify carrots as fruit. British Foreign Secretary Douglas

The European Self

163

The desire for distinctiveness, touted as a European ideal long before

the days of Guizot, exposes the segmentary logic underlying the ideology
of European unity. Especially in Greece and Britain, the haunts respectively of kleftes and merrie men, the battle is explicitly about who defines
that distinctiveness. For what Bourdieu says about distinction as the hallmark of class can be argued, a fortiori, for the hierarchy of cultures now
conjoined in a single administrative system: just as people place great
significance in symbols to which only a select few have access, nations
lay claim to the exclusive authorship and possession of whatever passes
globally for high culture.77
Thus, the very possibility of distinctiveness is logically entailed in a collective identity: a finite pool of names closes the circle against foreign
intrusions but constrains the degree of individuation possible, while the
demands of resurrection as well as the exigencies of practical politics
(such as the need to flatter a baptismal sponsor) both enable and constrain
the short-term possibilities of individuation and identification. Implicit
in these arrangements for naming are ideas about whether the selfhood
is European, Greek, regional, local, or personal.
implied by eghosmos
At one extreme is a Cretan village with strict naming rules but a parallel system of nicknames that become generalized as clan (patrigroup)
consists in adoptmarkers through time. There the height of eghosmos
ing with pride the unflattering nickname that others have conferred, while
making it clear that it will allow one to become the eponymous ancestor of
a named subclana true snatching of pride from the jaws of humiliation
and, as such, an excellent illustration of how a skilled social actor can turn
social structure to personal advantage.78 In a quieter vein, the inventiveness sometimes shown by urban sophisticates of both sexes in generating
new diminutives for their own and others personal names again speaks to
the ever-negotiable tension between having a Greek name and being oneself. At the other extreme, the ways in which Greeks approach national
territorial issues such as the Macedonian question (official policy has
been to deny the name of Macedonia to a neighboring state and to a

77
78

Hurd provides explanations in Hurd Highlights Myths and Lunacies of Brussels, The
Herald (Glasgow), November 7, 1992, 7. The excerpt from the Adam Smith Institute
report, authored by Timothy Evans and Russell Lewis, appears in Andrew Griffiths,
Cucumber Threat by Supernannies, The Daily Telegraph, May 5, 1993, 21.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
For an example of this, see Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest
and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985), 234.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

Slavic-speaking minority within Greeces borders) is locally interpreted

through the filter of the naming system, providing ample opportunities
for the exercise of personal nationalism in Cohens sense.79
PREDICAMENTS OF THE PICTURESQUE: VARIEGATIONS
OF A EUROPEAN SELFHOOD

Thus far I have examined a structural relationship between self and society.
I have suggested that it exhibits a high degree of internal flexibility. But
that flexibility is not well described by simply reducing it to the level of
individualism permitted by an otherwise determining social conformity.
We do not thereby satisfactorily answer the questions of how such ideologies are actually maintained, how they interact with the new circumstances
of class and globalization, or how they are inculcated at the level of daily
action. To answer these questions, I turn to a somewhat different line of
argument.
This approach is perhaps best exemplified by the idea of crafting
selves described by Dorinne Kondo in her study of Japanese artisans and
their self-fashioning.80 Kondo shows that the artisans see in the products
of their labor models of their idealized collective selves (although the point
is rather submerged in her account). Among Greek (especially Cretan)
artisans, I have found an immediate formal analog: differentiation among
artifacts reproduces individualism among artisans. The political leadership both hails this as an expression of the European quintessence and
excoriates it as resistance to modernity. The artisans, for their part, both
boast of their disgust with homogenization and self-critically lament
the difficulty of achieving standardization, a term that acquires negative reverberations only in the soundbox of intellectual debate, whence it
returns to everyday speech and further complicates the picture.
Such questions are not usefully addressed in terms of resistance,
except in the sense that acts of resistance may confirm the marginalization
of those who engage in them and claim them as evidence of moral purity
(which, in the European context, is often equated with political weakness).81 As Debbora Battaglia has rightly insisted, self-makingwhich
79
80
81

See David E. Sutton, Local Names, Foreign Claims: Family Inheritance and National
Heritage on a Greek Island, American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 41537.
Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a
Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
This must be understood contextually: moral purity is claimed as a compensation for political marginality. This is the process that Edwin Ardener identified as englobing (that
is, of the politically stronger by the politically weaker); see his The Problem Revisited,
in Shirley Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 1927.

The European Self

165

often engages rhetorics of individuation and collectivity in ways for which

we are ill-prepared by the standard rhetoric of Eurocentrismis far more
than the liberated residue of a structural ideology; it is inescapably caught
up in the inevitable inequalities of social existence.82 Thus, resistance
to standardization, or reluctance to embrace it, may serve a rhetoric of
picturesque European traditionalism and a refusal to submit to the rule of
bureaucracy; by that very token, it ensures the marginalization of oldfashioned artisans.
Obviously, there are differences in kinds of artisanal labor that produce differences of emphasis in the evaluation of its products. Standardization is more desirable in the building trade; the picturesque may more
legitimately appear in the personal touch in the output of, say, a goldsmith. But even the latter requires a disciplined body; as one exasperated
Cretan goldsmith told me, lamenting the difficulty of finding apprentices
who were willing to spend long hours at the workbench doing repetitious
mechanical tasks: It requires a lot of backside! Discipline here is intended to provide reliability. The essence of artisanal labor is that its products are reliable, yet also individuated and distinctive. The long hours of
apprenticeship serve to routinize this linkage of forms of labor with idioms
of selfhood.
Following on Kondos analysis, we can now begin to sketch a relationship between the kind of material objects that artisanal labor produces
and the kind of selfhood that these express. But note where this argument
has led us. We are not talking about a self individuated beyond the pale of
social relations, or a self that has so transcended its social context as to be
independent of it. Quite to the contrary, this is a self that can be recognized
only by virtue of its disciplined attention to the skills that permit a modest
but confident range of a variationmodest because extreme deviations
from the norm would look like sheer indiscipline; confident because artisans, who once made artifacts for experienced users, are today forced
into the role of experts for the benefit of tourists.
For tradition is in fact a modernist invention. By the same token,
what we might call picturesque individualism is the invention of a
particular kind of modernism: the aggressive personal autonomy first
described in detail for Greece by J. K. Campbell about the rough-hewn
Sarakatsan shepherds of northern Greece and recast as the in-your-face
pose of extreme autonomy that one meets in Athenian taxi-drivers and
82

Debbora Battaglia, Problematizing the Self: A Thematic Introduction, in Debbora

Battaglia, ed., Rhetorics of Self-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
115.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

intellectuals.83 This is, to be sure, unequivocally a stereotype of such people. It is, however, their own self-stereotype. It is what leads Cretan men to
force me to accept their hospitality without reciprocation, on the grounds
that this is what we Cretans do; like all stereotypes, it is by no means
universally accepted or enacted, but it is above all recognizable. This is
truly picturesque individualism, the modernist rendering of personal
sovereignty as a tradition.
What is especially interesting about this notion of the rewritten traditional self is that it takes on dramatic overtones borrowed from the language imprecisely glossed as honor and shame. The Greek term usually
translated as honor can more accurately be defined as the capacity to
live up to peoples expectations of someone in accordance with that persons current social status. This is a highly conformist notion, but its visibility is always contingent on a measure of aggressive nonconformisma
deformation of convention that becomes what James Boon has aptly called
an exaggeration of culture.84
Crete enjoyed a period of artisanal corporatism under Ottoman rule,
but that corporatism collapsed with the establishment of the welfare
state in Greece. Few Cretans are still artisans, and those who are cannot legally employ artisans without incurring punitive compulsory insurance charges. Deeply discontented with this restriction and aware that the
present-day state discourages them from organizing corporately, Cretans
commonly break the law in order to get cheap labor. Neither they nor
their apprentices would easily recognize themselves in, for example, the
historian James R. Farrs description of artisans in seventeenth-century
France. These artisans, claims Farr, evinced a deep concern with matters of honor in consequence of their desire for order, itself a product of
pre-Revolutionary corporatism. 85
If there were a direct correlation between the touchiness of honor
and the collective will to maintain the security of a corporatist polity,
one would expect the extreme concern with such matters found in Crete
not to have survived the collapsefar from recentof artisanal corporatism. Farr remarks, There was a strong connection between moral and
physical order in artisan mentality.86 But what, precisely, is an artisan
83
84

85
86

See Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage; Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons.
James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative
Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and their World in Dijon, 15501650 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988).
Farr, Hands of Honor, 195.

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167

mentality? Is this another exoticizing device, relegating the preRevolutionary French working classes to something analogous to LevyBruhls prelogical mentality? Is the concern with honor a sign of some
collective inability to distinguish between symbolic and literal forms of
truth,as we mightinferbyapplyingLloydsreadingof the mentalite concept?
Once we recognize that almost everything that has been classed as
honor has less to do with adherence to a structural code than with
meeting expectations, we can see that the whole game of reputation politics is a matter of social calculation and strategy. The strategy that leads
social actors to capitalize on tradition is in that sense continuous with
what it mimics, for what we call honor is a calculating claim to lineage, to
a past, to history. If today the expectations one must meet are manufactured through media representation, that suggests that tradition plays
the role once accorded by anthropologists, in rural contexts in southern
Europe, to honor. Tradition is the collective representation of an expected
conformity. In the European context its lack of homogeneity can be read as
the sign of a European individualism and as the mark of backwardness.
But such self-stereotyping is not uniform throughout Europe.
Post-Soviet Muscovites, for example, classify themselves as collective
people.87 Unless one wishes to view such pronouncements as proof of
the older stereotypesthat Slavs are collectivist and therefore not really
European88 they should alert us to the dangers of conflation, much as
do differences in local usages so often lumped together as honor. In
both instances circularity leads to preemptive arguments that ill serve the
goals of analysis.
One important difficulty with historical attempts to explain collective
values, as Farr attempts to do for the seventeenth-century artisans, is
that such reconstructions most commonly are made in the absence of
much knowledge of the ways in which the objects artisans created were
locally understood as models of the self. Even in social anthropology,
scholars have begun to pay serious attention only recently to the crafting
of subjectivities and the crafting of objects. If the artisans in Farrs account
were really so subject to the ideological dictates of the corporatist polity,
were the products of their labors similarly functional and uniform? Were
they perceived to be so? And what notions of artisanal (but also of literary)

87
88

I owe this information to Melissa C. Caldwell (Program in Social Studies, Harvard

University).
These sentiments, already noted in the work of Dora dIstria, appear to have animated
Finnish dislike of the Russians. See William A. Wilson, Folklore and Nationalism in
Modern Finland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 1323.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

originality and license were in the ascendant at that time and in that
place?
To address those questions, I briefly mention Susan Terrios remarkable work on French chocolatiers. Terrio describes how she arrived for
a tasting filled with fear of revealing her lack of expertise. She quickly
realized that she would not, indeed could not, admit to liking the sweeter
chocolates. Informed that the tasting was an apprenticeship, she found
herself swept into a new process of creating national culture by
educating the entire population into conformity with comprehensive models of how things should taste. She suggests that the imperative for
this massive inculcationwhich is about social representations of taste
rather than about a psychological preferencecame from the threats
posed to French autonomy by incorporation in the European Union: Attempts to forge Europeanness in the name of a universal culture were
especially problematic given the existence of a notion of French culture also defined as universal and embodied in French cultural achievements from literature to cuisine.89 The threat posed by Belgian chocolates led the French manufacturers of hand-crafted chocolates to accent
their Aztec origins, using exoticism to describe their product in complementarity with the traditional (or domestically exotic) aspect of its
production.
Here is the logic of segmentation in full force, etched in the dark bitter
chocolate that the new French cultural logic demands. Universality itself
becomes a remarkable fissile propertyjust like the Divine Being of the
Nuer, refracted through all the divisions of the body politic: my universality is better than yours, because my chocolate is better than yoursmuch
as Guizot had argued over a century earlier that the French were the most
European of all because they were the most internally differentiated.90
Possessive individualism is sovereignty.
French chocolatiers have been able to insert their cause in the larger
cultural hierarchies of taste that dominate world markets. The Cretan
artisans have been less lucky. Their alleged individualism allows them to
claim a European tradition, but their supposedly traditional products
have not achieved the popular appeal that perhaps may be possible only
in a country confident of its own modernitya place where, as Michael
Thompson has argued, garbage becomes valuable and feeds an entire
89
90

Susan J. Terrio, Crafting Grand Cru Chocolates in Contemporary France, American

Anthropologist 98 (1996): 6779.
Ibid., 77.

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industry in nostalgia.91 Greek artisans do not occupy the same role in

Greek national self-imagination that their French counterparts do in
France. In Greece many artisans produce cheap and obvious copies of
older artifacts, an outcome derided as kitsch. These artisans are legally
marginalized, their quarrelsome selfhood both a stick with which the local
elite continually beats them and an emblem of the whole nations standing among the European powers. In France artisans represent an idealized
past that is still glorious, their products an expression of the values a conservative national government holds dear. In Greece the few remaining
artisans, strike some sophisticates as an affront to the modernity of which
most authorities are not yet confident.

FROM ARTISANAL MODELS TO MODEL

SELVES: TOWARD THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

I have dwelt on the role of artisans in European self-fashioning in part

because they have come to signify the quintessential European combination of artistic invention and confident conformity. Although this
assumption of a modernist traditionality works to the great benefit of
those who inhabit the powerful core countries, it becomes a device of
self-marginalization at the weaker periphery. The proud French individualistthe hero of Guizots imaginationbecomes, in his Greek counterpart, a quarrelsome egotist, a slavish imitator, or an incompetent amateur, and above all an oriental incapable of factory standards. Thus,
the relationship of craft to stereotype also becomes an index of sometimes painful political differences within the presumed unity of
Europe.
But are these really different people? And are they so very different
from the post-Soviet collectivists of Moscow? The answer is an important prolegomenon, I suggest, to thinking about orientalist fantasies about
alleged Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern notions about selfhood, the
value of human life, and so on. For just as Nadel-Klein has suggested that
intra-European (and even intranational) patterns of domination provided
the template for global colonialism,92 so too the intra-European creation
of a hierarchy of selfhoods may have furnished a model for these orientalist illusionsand a critical review of the discourse about individualism
91
92

Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
Nadel-Klein, Reweaving the Fringe, 5024.

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M ICHAEL H ERZFELD

and sociocentrism within Europe may help us to understand much more

fully how European colonizers learned to articulate that discourse with
more directly coercive means of turning subjectivity into subjection.
My story ends at this point, in some necessary degree of confusion. For
it is clear that the idea of a distinctive European selfhood is a mirage. The
idea of a uniform European self is considerably less promising than
that of a single European currency. Yet the goal of creating a truly panEuropean subjectivity dies hard: much everyday ideological labor goes
into suppressing the presence of disagreement and difference, as in the
European Space Agency.93 While this certainly has practical implications
as wellit would be hard to run such an agency without at least the
semblance of cooperationit is clear that ideas of a common European
subjectivity with common goals have political durability of an impressive
order.
The idea of a typically European individualism confuses the discourse
with its subject matter. That discourses of individuality are widespread
in Europe, and that they share a considerable range of rhetorical guises,
seems incontrovertible. But the tensions that pit individualist against
collectivist sentiment are not confined to Europe, and even there, as
Battaglia sagely notes, we sometimes find that the binary opposition between them is a misleading rhetoric. In her edited volume on the making of
selves, all the authors construct their arguments around, or in reaction to,
a purported Western model of the individualistic self. But this, again,
says much more about the Western provenance of the authors and their
received theories than it does about any inevitable linkage of the West
with individualismbeyond, that is, the ideological discourse through
which, in a rich array of variegated interpretations, political leaders in
Europe have decreed that such a linkage existed.
Thus, the ultimate irony is that the European ideology of individualism
is necessarily a conformist concept, grounded in the relationship between
property ownership and selfhood. Of late it seems to have figured less
prominently in the discourse of European integration. Perhaps, indeed,
as the European program of political unification lurches ahead, the entire
issue of individualism will seem less important than the conformity of
cucumbers. But that, too, would be an ignominious end for the enormous
volume of intellectual labor that has sustained it as dogma for over two
centuries.

93

Zabusky, Launching Europe, 206.

8
European Nationalism and European Union
ARIANE CHEBEL DAPPOLLONIA

At first sight the concept of a European nationalism would seem to

be meaningless. At the very least it evokes either an empty abstraction
or an impossible dilemma. Nationalism, after all, is tied to the nation
(and vice versa), and although Europe is composed of nation-states, the
European Union is presented as being an antinational construction,
a-national at best, sometimes even as supranational. During the 1950s,
the European founding fathers presented the European Coal and Steel
Community (ECSC) and then the European Economic Community (EEC)
precisely as a means to suppress the oppressive and warlike nationalism
that had plunged Europe into two internecine wars in less than a century.
This theme created a confusion between nationalism and the idea of the
nation, between nationalism and state sovereignty.
Today, however, European unification is no longer considered to be a
step forward, nor for many people even a real necessity. The debate over
the Maastricht Treaty has made things worse. On one side, the supporters
of the treaty have turned most mentions of the national idea into diabolical
references to a dark historical past, since these were the main arguments
employed by the treatys opponents. Consolidating European unification
is a modern way of limiting the damaging propensity of nations to become
nationalist was a recurring motto proclaimed in the name of a so-called
European identity. On the other side, national nationalism (that is,
the usual defensive nationalism of the nation based on a selfish love of
a specific country) was celebrated as the last barrier protecting national
identity against a diabolical supranational European Union. This antiMaastricht rhetoric resulted in a highly questionable equation: Building
Europe means destroying nations. The first of these attitudes is based on
a false sacralization of Europe. The second, on a false sacralization of the
nation.
171

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DAPPOLLONIA

In order to understand the various meanings of European nationalism, one must recognize that there is no necessary contradiction between
European ideals and national identities, between European unification
and national nationalism. Far from it. European identity must reside
in the concrete and symbolic realities created by centuries of history.
Furthermore, the affirmation of national identitieswhich should be distinguished from narrow and aggressive nationalismcan even act as a
democratic counterweight to a European Union that is not, or is not yet,
an entity possessed of a totemic transcendence to which national realities,
feelings, and symbols must be sacrificed.
A second preliminary objection must be clarified. It is unclear whether,
as is generally believed, the nation created nationalism or, as Ernest Gellner
has suggested, nationalism, in fact, created nations.1 Neither account,
however, is immediately relevant to a discussion of the situation within
the European Union as it is currently constituted. In the first place the
nations that now make up the Union have not always been nationalist
during Europes long history; in the second nationalism has often been
expressed within frameworks that were both larger and smaller than that
of the nation itself. In other words, it is difficult to analyze nationalism
apart from the idea of nation and national territory. Afro-Asianism
and Arabism are, for instance, examples of transnational nationalisms
that, in these cases, have sought to unite the disparate nations of the
developing world. (The same, of course, is true of the European colonial empires that preceded them; they represent but one of the possible
versions of European nationalism.) Inversely, the present resurgence of
national-populism (in the East as in the West), the emergence of multiple
forms of communitarianism stemming from a hodgepodge of ethnic or
religious solidarities, and the relative successes of separatist regionalisms
(Northern Italy, the Basque Country, Corsica, and so on) represent just
as many examples of infranational nationalisms.
European nationalism can be defined through an ideological and historical analysis of the evolution of the nation-states within the present
European Union on one side and with reference to the past and present
aspirations for a postnational Europe on the other side. A clear and significant parallel exists between European cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and aspirations that underlie the creation
of the European Union. From the Enlightenment to the Second World
War, European nationalism had two meanings: a romantic conception
1

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).

European Nationalism and European Union

173

of a new united Europe that would bypass the modern nation-state by

limiting state sovereignty, and an ideological tool used to create or legitimate new nation-states. The first of these, which rested on the heritage of European cosmopolitanism, may be called antinational European nationalism. The second, which appeared after and in reaction to
the European order imposed in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna and then
in 1919 at the Congress of Versailles, may be defined as a pro-national
European nationalism. Both gave birth to todays Europeanism, which
can be understood either as the continuity of the eternal dream of a European federation or as a more modest attempt to make the European states
collaborate more closely. Both, however, gave birth to anti-Europeanism,
the present form of the old anticosmopolitanism. In both cases the historicity of the nation-state and of its national state control is strikingly
apparent.
FROM EUROPEAN COSMOPOLITANISM TO ANTINATIONAL
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM

History reminds us that nations emerged slowly. It took many decades,

many wars and revolutions for them to take shape. We must keep in mind
this historicity, grounded, as it is, in ethnic-cultural references and symbols, in order to refuse them any sacralization. Furthermore, the idea of
nation is politically neutral and could easily be adapted to any available political regime. It appeared in parliamentary monarchies, authoritarian empires, and in republics of various types. One of the reasons
for the failure of the 1848 revolutions was that all the nationalists
Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Czechswere divided into conservatives,
liberals, and republicans. In other words, the nation itself was politically
neutral.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, national sentiments became more and more exclusive with the emergence of narrow nationalisms based on an increasingly closed conception of the nation. A process
of antagonistic identification allowed European nations to define themselves against each other: the proliferation of mutual exclusion stereotypes (the Anglo-Saxon Krauts, the French Boches) was a proof
of the gradual construction of national consciousness. Even the universalistic philosophers of the Enlightenment talked about the spirit of nations largely in terms of stereotypes. For Rousseau, the English had the
prejudices of pride and the French the prejudices of vanity. A. W.
Schlegel compared unfavorably the French to the good German, honest,

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loyal, solid, precise and profound.2 Here was the embryo of the coming
conflicts between aggressive nationalisms that have divided Europe since
the nineteenth century. Here also was the beginning of the grand strategies for a unified Europe based on closer, more enduring cosmopolitan
projects.
Cosmopolitanism was fueled by a rising feeling of European unity as
well as by a European superiority complex toward non-European populations. The closed conception of the nation, illustrated by Johann Gottfried
Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for instance, was rejected by many
writers and philosophers throughout Europe, but for two very distinct
reasons.3 For some, the nation-state was too recent a creation to possess any effective reality, or it was conducive only to conflict. European
cosmopolitanism, by contrast, was rooted in a long tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance, which had included such figures as Erasmus and
Leonardo da Vinci, and which drew upon the Christian ideal of universal
peace. For others, the narrow conception of the nation seemed to lead
only to an aggressive nationalism that had been the prime cause of most
of the wars of the modern era.
Consequently, the reinforcement of national nationalism gave rise to
the first expression of European nationalism. As Europe was divided into
aggressive nation-states, there was a convergence between the idea of
Europe and the condemnation of national nationalism. This European
nationalism took three successive forms. Firstly, from the Enlightenment to 1848, it proclaimed that the nation was just a step toward a
larger totality, humanity. The universe contained Europe, which contained nations without any hierarchy. For Rousseau, in his Considerations
sur le gouvernement de Pologne, there are no more French, German,
Spanish, even Englishmen whatever one says, there are only Europeans.
They all have the same tastes, the same passions, the same habits. As
Iselin declared, Real patriotism is only an emanation of the pure love
of humanity.4 To these antinational European nationalists, there was
a concentric order of allegiances, from the family to the nation, from
the nation to Europe, from Europe to the universe. There was also no
contradiction between Europeanism and national sentiments when these
sentiments were not exclusive. For Montesquieu, Matters are such in
2
3

Quoted in Paul Hazard, La pensee europeenne au XVIII`e si`ecle (Paris: Fayard, 1963).
Johann Gottfried Herder, Lettres sur le progr`es de lhumanite (17931797) and Idees sur
la philosophie de lhumanite (17841791); Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Discours a` la nation
allemande (1808).
Iselin quoted by Hazard, La pensee.

European Nationalism and European Union

175

Europe that all states need each other. Europe is a state made up of several provinces.5
This first expression of European nationalism was determined by a conviction of the superiority of the European over the non-European areas
of the world. Even before Europe entered the final, and most expansive
phase of its overseas expansion, most Europeans held their continent to be
well above the others. For Voltaire, in Le si`ecle de Louis XV, Europe was
one great republic divided into several states, all with common religious
bases, all with the same legal and political principles unknown in other
parts of the world.6 Intellectual supremacy, military power, economic
development, and commercial prosperity marked Europe as a homogeneous whole and gave it a unity far beyond national divisions. Until the
First World War, European nationalism was mixed with Eurocentrism.
European universalism was paradoxically founded on the particularism
of the continent: it was precisely because European culture was unique
that it could claim to be also universal.
This claim to universalism equally marked various pacifist projects,
as illustrated by Kants Perpetual Peace, written in 1795. For Kant, the
European idea was linked to pacifism (with the proposal of a disarmament plan), to the respect for morality, and to the application of rights
as the emanation of Reason. In proposing the creation of a general confederation of the European states as an essential step toward the construction of a world republic, Kant was, of course, consciously participating in a discussion that had been going on for centuries. It was
started during the Renaissance by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives,
continued by Hugo Grotius, and hugely extended during the eighteenth
century by, among others, William Penn in Present and Future Peace of
Europe (1693), Charles Irenee de Saint Pierre (Projet pour rendre la paix
perpetuelle en Europe, Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle entre souverains chretiens, written between 1713 and 1717), and Jeremy Bentham
with his Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace (17869).7
Even before the peoples spring of 1848, European nationalism
was characterized by two basic characteristics: the will to protect
Europe against itself by establishing a federation, and the ambition to protect European interests and European supremacy against non-European
5
6
7

Montesquieu, De lEsprit des lois (Geneva, 1748), book XI, where he analyzes the characteristics of the federal republic.
Voltaire, Le si`ecle de Louis XIV (1756), Cap. XXXIX.
In 1761 Rousseau published an abridged version of Saint Pierres Projet, and in 1782 he
wrote his Jugement sur la paix perpetuelle.

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enemies. The fact that neither project was ever realized should not lead
to the conclusion that Kant and others were merely Utopians. Far from
it. Some of Kants critics, and Kant himself, insisted that his cosmopolitanism did not derive from an exaggerated concern for the human race as
such, but from the importance he attributed to right (Recht) law, to the
pragmatic recognition of the advantages of a peaceful alliance that could
be achieved only with the consent of the people. In other words, Europe
was an ideal-type that would be achieved in future time.
From 1848 to 1939, European nationalism assumed its second form
with the antinational theme of the United States of Europe. Derived
from the currents of opinion that opposed the new European order imposed in 1815, the various projects for the United States aimed to limit the
bellicose effects of state nationalisms and to combat the specter of the decline of Europe. Unlike the proponents of Kants Cosmopolitan Right
(ius cosmopoliticum), it was essentially the fear of seeing Europe lose its
dominant position that motivated the followers of European nationalism. Defended by Victor Hugo and Richard Cobden, the two principal
figures at the Congress of Peace organized in 1849 in Paris, the project
of the United States of Europe was a response more to the conscious desire to adapt the European states to the demands of a new international
environment than to an innate desire to unify them. This was why the
free-exchange economists of the time supported the idea. Hugo evoked
the markets opening themselves to commerce, these new battlefields,
in his famous speech of 1849. The day will come, he declared, when
you France, you Russia, you England, and you Germany, when all you
nations of the continent, without losing distinctive qualities or your individual glories, will bind yourself tightly together into a single superior
entity, and you will come to constitute a European fraternity, as absolutely as Brittany, Burgundy and Alsace are now bound together with
France.8
For certain intellectuals and economists, the state was an outmoded
political and economic entity, and nationalism an obsolete expression
of old narrow-minded beliefs. The success of the Zollverein, then of
German and Italian unification, confirmed these convictions, which were
defended at the third International Congress in Rome in 1891 and at the
1900 Congress of the Free School of Political Sciences. On this last occasion, the participants proved themselves ardent propagators of European
8

Victor Hugo, Douze discours (Paris, 1850). See Oeuvres compl`etes: Actes et Paroles (Paris:
Hetzel, 1882).

European Nationalism and European Union

177

nationalism by insisting that Europe was being threatened by the rise of

new countries (including the United States of America): clients of Europe
which have become its rivals.
This belief in an external menace became a certitude during the interwar period, during which European nationalism became as virulent
as it was inefficient, and all the more antinational since it was the nationalisms of the nation-states that had unleashed the Great War. On
the political level, the United States of Europe was revived by Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Pan-European Movement. On the economic
level, the desire to bypass the narrow parameters of the existing nationstates led to several attempts at commercial and customs unions, including the European Customs Union created in 1925. The Spaniard Ortega
y Gasset perfectly summed up the content of the European nationalism
of this time: each nation which was at one time a large open space,
has become a province. . . . All nationalisms are at an impasse. . . . Only
the decision to build a great nation with the continental populations will
resuscitate the pulse of Europe. It was historical realism which taught me
to understand that the unity of Europe as a society is not an ideal but a
fact of a very ancient everyday life.9
Confronted by the threat of Bolshevism, on the one hand, and by the
economic power of the United States, on the other, the Pan-European
Movement became a lobby incorporating eminent politicians in what constituted a veritable regional organization. Provided with a council composed of delegates from its member states, an assembly of delegates from
the national parliaments, and a Court of Justice, this organization was
supposed to remedy the crisis in European civilization. To allay the fears of
the antifederalists, Coudenhove-Kalergi and Aristide Briand assured them
that nothing, in Coudenhove-Kalergis words, would touch the common
sovereignty of the nations who were a part of such an association.10
Juridically speaking, such a plan was completely incoherent. But from the
point of view that interests us, pan-Europeanism was clearly the expression of a European nationalism of self-defense at a time when the seeming
menace of internal and external enemies made European unity a necessity,
although one that was as yet unobtainable.
Unite or die: the formula returned in force after the Second World
War. The disasters provoked by the new conflict, the division of the world
9
10

de las masas (first published in 1926).

Jose Ortega y Gasset, La rebelion
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jai choisi lEurope (Paris: Plon, 1952), 176. See also Fondation Archives europeennes, Le plan Briand dunion federale europeenne (Gen`eve, 1992).

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into two blocs, and the loss of most of the European colonial empires motivated the speeches of the Founding Fathers of Europe. Whether unionists
or federalists, these Founding Fathers personified the third expression of
European nationalism: a mixture of pacifism, of reaffirmed faith in market mechanisms, of commercial ambitions, and of nostalgia for past glories justifying the ambition for future glories. On this last point Winston
Churchills famous speech in Zurich in 1946 is explicit: if the European
countries succeeded in uniting, their 300 to 400 million inhabitants would
know, by the fruit of their common heritage, a prosperity, a glory, a happiness that no boundary, no border could contain. . . . We must construct
such a thing as the United States of Europe.11 This declaration can be
compared to the definition of the nation given by Ernest Renan in 1882:
the common possession of a rich legacy of memories which must be
brought to fruition, that is the social capital upon which a national
idea can be established.12 It is therefore during the postwar years that
European nationalism has borrowed most from the national mystique by
defining itself according to the same criteria as the nation-state: historical
memory-building, a common identity and culture for all of the entities
grouped within the bounds of a given territory, and political and economic objectives destined to ensure general prosperity and to defend the
global interests of its participants.
The rediscovery or the total and/or partial recomposition of an historic
past justifies certain references to a common identity and culture. If, as
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle maintained in LEurope: Histoire de ses peuples,
history has created a real Europe, there can be no such thing as a
European history of Europe.13 In other words, European history is just a
juxtaposition of national histories. But, if the facts are not European, the
interpretations are.
Wars have always played a fundamental role in the composition of the
national identity. For the French the battle of Valmy in 1792 is the foundational act on which the mystique of the modern Republic is founded. The
Founding Fathers of the European Union adopted the same mechanism
of symbolic identification. Only in this case it is not the memories of glorious victory on which the new nation is founded but rather the desire
to escape from a conflict that for all those involved has been, in one way
11
12
13

Churchill, quoted by Elisabeth du Reau, Lidee dEurope au XX`e si`ecle (Bruxelles: Complexe, 1996), 1334.
Ernest Renan, Quest-ce quune nation? Conference a` la Sorbonne, 11 Mars 1882, in
Oeuvres Compl`etes, tome 1 (Paris: 1947), 887906.
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, LEurope: Histoire de ses peuples (Paris: Perrin, 1990), 24ff.

European Nationalism and European Union

179

or another, a form of defeat. The basic paradox of European nationalism

is that it is fed by the memory of events that divided and bloodied, rather
than united, Europe. In the eyes of the European nationalists, it is of little
consequence that these wars were experienced differently by the different
European nations, that they were the supreme manifestation of opposing
interests.
The wars themselves were a dividing factor; the interpretation of the
wars by the Europeanists, however, has become a supremely unifying factor. To this must be added the theme of a common enemy, an
indispensable ingredient for any antinationalism. Beginning in the 1950s,
this common enemy was the Soviet presence in Europe. The Founding
Fathers therefore presented their initiatives as so many steps in a crusade
for the defense of the Western world. On the cultural level, too, the differences between the peoples of Europe disappeared from the speeches of
the Europeanists. In 1949, at the end of the Lausanne Conference,
Denis de Rougemont, soul of the European Center of Culture, declared:
for what ends do we desire these cultural means and this teaching of
a common European conscience? Europe has always been open to the
entire world. Right or wrong, by idealism or by ignorance, by virtue of
its faith or by its imperialist views, it has always perceived its civilisation
as an ensemble of universal values.14 Since the cosmopolitanism of the
Enlightenment, the discourse has hardly varied.
Next, European nationalism gave itself a clearly defined territory, the
Cold War having temporarily settled the eternal question of Europes eastern borders. In this geographic or, more precisely, geo-political framework, European nationalism justified its position by arguing the expected
advantages of unification, for present and future generations. On a par
with national nationalism, European nationalism has always included a
good dose of messianism. In 1948 the participants at the Hague congress
parted company by pledging to support with all their might the men
and the governments who are working for this measure of public good, a
supreme chance for peace and guarantee of a great future for this generation and for those to come. Even today the champions of the Maastricht
Treaty justify their position in the name of a reconstructed past and an
idealized future.
Similarly, the defensive conception of European nationalism has hardly
changed since the end of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the
14

Denis de Rougemont, Oeuvres compl`etes, 3 vols., Ecrits sur lEurope, vol. 1: 19481961
(Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1994), 85.

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Count of Saint-Simon on the need to establish a large economic and commercial space is still a topical question. He was one of the first, after the
collapse of the Napoleonic empire, to understand that it was only through
unity that the various states of Europe could prevent Europe from losing
its global supremacy. Furthermore, he fully grasped the importance of the
industrial revolution and the impact it would eventually have upon the
nations of the Old World. In order to meet the need to unite economically,
while still preserving the sovereignty of the individual European states, he
presented a proposal in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna. Written in collaboration with Augustin Thierry, it was entitled Reorganisation de la societe
europeenne, ou de la necessite et des moyens de rassembler les peuples
dEurope en un seul corps politique en conservant a` chacun sa nationalite
(The reorganization of European society, or the need and the means to
unite the peoples of Europe in a single political body while still preserving
their individual nationalities). Saint-Simons arguments were modern:
the problem he outlined is still a pressing onethe relationship between
the economical and the political in the construction of Europe. This he described as the outcome of a necessary evolution that would at once protect
Europe from itself and save it from decline. Thus he praised a collaboration between the member states on a number of specific projects such
as railways, central European banks, and an increase in the commerce of
free exchangeto paraphrase the Schuman declaration of 1950. Finally,
in the image of the nationalist historiographers, the partisans of European
nationalism have always had a tendency to reconstruct the history of their
doctrine, and of the achievements to which it has led, as a rectilinear trajectory in order to justify the theory of a linear evolution over the centuries
of the European idea.
FROM EUROPEAN COSMOPOLITANISM TO PRO-NATIONAL
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM

A second type of European nationalism, rather than opposing European

construction and national interests, proclaimed that Europe was the best
way to protect the national interests of old and new nations. This nationalism, which appeared after the new European order imposed in 1815,
is based on the evolution of nationalism from a narrow to a broadened
form. Europe is no longer conceived as the sum of the nation-states of
which it is constituted, united, in a more or less supranational structure,
according to the ambitions of the various governments involved. It is perceived instead as a means to bypass national governments by giving a

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181

voice to the populations that make up the nation-states and by ensuring the protection of national identities outside the strict framework of
the state. In other words, this second model dissociates state sovereignty
from popular sovereignty, national identity from state sovereignty. Europe
is conceived as serving the national interest of all its members. Antinational European nationalism thus led to a European construction from
the top. Pro-national European nationalism implied a unification from
the bottom.
In recent history this second model has taken two forms. Before 1945
it was the Europe of peoples opposed to the Europe of princes, the Europe
of nationalities opposed to the Europe of realpolitik. Since the 1950s, pronational European nationalism has fed infranational claims: the Europe
of regions is presented as a counterweight to the federative logic of the
European Union and as an antidote to the widely perceived supranational
technocratic tendencies of the Union. It is the Europe of the heartlands
against the Europe of the Eurocrats.
This form of pro-national European nationalism was particularly powerful at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth
century in those regions of Europe that were struggling to emancipate
themselves from the older imperial structures, Ottoman Turkey in the East
and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the West. For Rhigas Velestinlis,
the principal Greek and Albanian nationalist of the period, some kind of
united Europe or Balkan federation seemed to be the only way to secure
national independence. In Velestinliss Thouros, a hymn celebrating independence that was greatly influenced by French philosophers, European
unification was conceived as the only vehicle for achieving an independent Greek homeland.15 Similarly, Teofan Noli, leader of the short-lived
Albanian democratic government in 1924, created a Pan-Albanian federation (Vatra) for the same objective.
In Italy Giuseppe Mazzini provided the best example of a romantic
pro-national European nationalism. From his Young Italy in 1831 to his
Young Europe in 1834, he pursued the same goal: to build Europe in order
to build Italy and vice versa. His conception of the resurgence (risorgimento) of Italy was a mixture of Jacobin-inspired liberalism, religiosity
(God and the People), and universalism. His nationalism, however, was
15

Rhigas Velestinlis lived from 1757 to 1798. While he was secretary to the hospodar
de Valachia, he became an enthusiast for the French Revolution and wrote a national
anthem modeled on the Marseillaise. Some years later, after he had settled in Vienna,
he participated in the diffusion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the Balkans.
After an abortive attempt to return to his native country, he was arrested by the Austrian
police and then handed over to the Pasha of Belgrade who executed him.

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very far from being xenophobic. Convinced that the people could win the
free exercise of their sovereignty only by making state and nationality
coincide, Mazzini proposed a Holy Alliance of Nations to combat the
Holy Alliance concluded in 1815 and the concert of nations orchestrated
by Metternich. For him, humanity was not a cosmopolitan world split
into immutable nation-states but a whole, created by God, that united all
peoples in the awareness of a common origin and a common future. In
1834 he published the program for his Young Europe according to which
free national associations signed an act of brotherhood, a declaration of
principle constituting the universal moral law and referring to the principles of Liberty, Equality and Progress. In his essay of 1860, The Duties
of Man, he described Europe as the means to achieve a superior political
order.
Mazzinis pro-national European nationalism was also founded on an
antigovernmental inter-European dynamic and on a democratic conception of the nation-state. His thinking sums up perfectly the desire to promote a peoples Europe instead of a Europe of monarchs. The whole of
humanity, he argued, had now been called upon to restructure itself into a
federalist system of unitary nations under the aegis of republicanism. The
republic was, for him, the only form of government that was legitimate
and logical, and thus compatible with both morality and nationality. It
was at once the mark of national identity and of the universality of a body
of citizens united in a federal system of individual nations. As such, the
republic was the sole form of government capable of reconciling national
sentiment and European unity. Promoter of an International League of
Peoples in April 1847, Mazzini personified the Europe of the peoples
spring of 1848 with its blend of internationalism, Europeanism, and
messianic nationalism.16 After the failure of the revolution of 1868, he
tried to materialize his ideals with the notion of a universal republican
alliance in September 1866.
The double patriotic and Europeanist inspiration of Mazzini reflects the
three ambiguities inherent in pro-national European nationalism. First,
the bond between the unitary nationalist vocation and the idea of the
spontaneous solidarity of populations has never resisted the ravages of
the aggressive nationalism of nation-states. Second, while opposed to the
conservative theories more or less based on the notion of an unchanging
natural order, Mazzinian thinking integrated a strong dose of organistic
16

Giuseppe Mazzini, Le programme de la Jeune Europe, in R. Benichi and M. Nouchi,

Le livre de lEurope (Paris: Stock, 1990).

European Nationalism and European Union

183

convictions. Evidence for this lies in his scheme for a territorial redivision of the European States, a project that owed more to Fichte or to
David Frederic Strauss than it did to Ernest Renan. Mazzini proposed
the creation of fourteen groups divided according to history, tradition,
geography, and language. This new European map would have equitably
repartitioned the whole of the continent between the great Graeco-Roman,
Germanic, and Slavic families. Third, just as antinational European nationalism utilizes the same criteria for defining Europe as for defining the
nation, while at the same time claiming to bypass the latter, Mazzinis
pro-national European nationalism remains confined to the strict logic
of the national framework. In short, Mazzini was conflating Italy with
Europe.
What was good for Italy, however, was not necessarily applicable to
Europe as a whole. Furthermore, Mazzini was prevented from becoming
a prophet in his own country since the Risorgimento was carried out from
the top by a process of governmental centralization and not according to
the rights of the peoples to govern themselves. The resisters to unification
by a Piedmontese monarchy were numerous, particularly in the South. As
the federalist Carlo Cattaneo argued in his Gli stati uniti dItalia, Sicily
and Naples are not regions, but states. And from 1848 until 1870, in
particular with the uprising in Palermo in 1866, the unification was constantly threatened by the Southern Question, as in one way or another it
has continued to be ever since. At the time of the defeat of Adoua in 1896,
Ferdinando Martino, the minister of public instruction, commented:
Fatta lItalia, bisogna fare gli Italiani (We have made Italy, now we
must make the Italians)a phrase echoed by many of Europes present
observers: we have made Europe, now we must make the Europeans.17
Nonetheless, Mazzini was one of the first to emphasize the necessity
of transnational solidarities to establish European unity, whether under a
supranational or intergovernmental form. For the Italian patriot, the republican ideal was, as it had been for Kant, the only possible transnational
bond between the European peoples. The European federalist system that
he envisioned would have allowed the republican conquests that had occurred in France and Italy to be extended to the whole of the continent. After the failure of the revolution of 1848, Mazzini turned to the possibility
of a workers international union on a European scale as another form of
opposition to an exclusively narrow national framework. The European
17

See J. C. Lescure, Faire les Italiens, in LEurope des nationalismes aux nations (Paris:
Sedes, 1996), 2:9.

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dimension of this project, rivaled then ruined by the creation of the First
International, was more important than the protection it offered to the
interests of the worker. Other representatives of the European left similarly refused to fashion European construction after the state model
(the goal of pro-national European nationalism being precisely the defense of national interests against the omnipotence of governments that
were detested because of their policies). Those left-leaning Europeans proposed various federalist plans that would comply with two fundamental
criteria: the guarantee of the exercise of a democratic citizenship and a
real control over state power by a series of counter powers, with Europe
considered as a intermediary organism. For Joseph Proudhon, author
of The Federative Principle (1863), Europe should be a confederation
of confederations respecting individual interests in a national collectivity and national interests in a European collectivity. The self-government
of the basic groups was doubled by a federal structure ensuring the coordination of the whole. The sharing of power on all levels ensured the
respect of pluralism despite the propensities of states to unification or
annexation. In 1872 in Federalism, Socialism and Antitheology, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin proposed the creation of a United States of Europe
far removed from that envisioned by Victor Hugo or Richard Cobden.
For Bakunin, the question was not one of obtaining the agreement of
states in order for them to cooperate economically and politically. It was
rather a question of suppressing unitary states for the good of nations, of
replacing the existing hierarchical organization with a federation of free
individuals.
Proudhon and Bakunin had only a limited influence on the construction of Europe. One should not conclude, however, that their plans were
buried under the weight of history. Both imagined the emergence of a
European social organism, similar to the one currently being discussed
within the European Union. Both accented the need to respect the pluralism at the heart of European unity and the need for the peoples support in
the vast project of European unity. Finally, both considered the problem
of minoritieswhether cultural, religious, or even socialin a Europe
that would be homogeneous while still ensuring the free expression of
diversity.
To these projects should be added the efforts of the Austro-Marxists after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to rethink the
relationship of state and citizenship. For Karl Renner, European nationalism was the only force capable of protecting the liberty of individuals
and the autonomy of nations. He even suggested dissociating nationality

European Nationalism and European Union

185

from territorial limits in order to make it a personal attribute, in the image

of religious allegiance: each person would have the right to choose his or
her national affiliation, and the nations thus constituted would possess
their own legislation, budget, and administration. The coherence of the
whole would be ensured at the European level, with constant care to favor
participation by citizens and their free expression of the desire for community and national identity.18
In the Europe redrawn by the various treaties that concluded the First
World War, the directors of the new states proved to be the most receptive to the projects of European unification in order to protect the interests, the very existence even, of their national constructions. According
to polls conducted between June and August of 1930, the general attitude toward Aristide Briands European Union plan was one of refusal,
with the exception of such recent creations as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Although they were somewhat older creations, Greece and Bulgaria
also approved the plan because they saw in Europe a means to limit the
influence of the great powers, the same powers that had amputated a
part of Bulgaria and had prevented Greece from achieving the Megale
Idea.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, pro-national European nationalism thus expressed itself in two ways. First, it was expressed through
the intermediary of various community actions, the most recent being the
creation, under the Maastricht Treaty, of a citizenship of the Union.
Second, it was expressed by the partisans of transnational solidarities,
and even more so by the defenders of intranational autonomist forces.
The common link between these forms of European nationalism was the
desire to reinforce the intermediary actions between state and individual, between the individual and market, between the centralization of
econo-political power and the necessary adaptation to the logistics of
globalization. They also shared the rejection of a narrow nationalism.
The demand for a citizens Europe reflects the conditions of the exercise of citizenship outside of the limits of the nation-state according to
a double ideological heritage: (1) a broadly liberal consensus that views
citizenship as a means to control executive powers, as much national as
European, and (2) the progressive current that since the eighteenth century has pleaded in favor of the defense of particular interests for the
18

The chancellor and then president of the Austrian Republic (1945), Karl Renner, belonged
to the reforming wing of the Social-Democrat Party. Before the war he and Otto Bauer
edited the journal Der Kampf. His basic ideas are set out in La fonction sociale du droit
(1904).

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common good. These two traditions are reactivated today by the debate
on the democratic deficit of the European Union.
The latest variation of pro-national European nationalism is the attempt to bypass the nation-state from the bottom, that is to say, from the
regions. The argument is simple: the nation-state is becoming outmoded,
its historicity leading it to a rapid obsolescence after the European and
worldwide developments brought about by globalization. The construction of Europe could accelerate this process by redefining new territorial
boundaries. Furthermore, according to its adherents, the resurgence of
regional identities would favor greater democratic expression, by permitting more direct participation by citizens (local referendum theory) and a
better understanding of national and infranational diversities.
The Maastricht Treaty thus took a decisive step toward the recognition
of infranational autonomist aspirations in creating a Regional Committee. This move was preceded by an initiative on the part of the Council of
Europe. Having long supported the creation of cooperative transnational
organizations, the Council in 1985 initiated the Assembly of European
Regions. The opening of economic representation offices in Brussels by
certain regions, such as Catalonia and Languedoc-Roussillon, also illustrates this evolution toward an increasingly active role for subnational entities on transregional bases. One example is the cooperation institutionalized between the members of the European Quadrige (Bade Wurtemburg,
Lombardy, the Rhone-Alps region, and Catalonia) created in 1988. This
process is still too recent to assess an eventual outcome. Will it lead, as
the Council has always hoped, to the emergence of new infranational
solidarities united at a supranational level? Or will it result in the further
narrowing of European space in the name of tribal regionalism, which will
further complicate a decision-making process already made cumbersome
by the addition of a supplementary level of bureaucracy?
THE PREDICAMENT OF EUROPEAN NATIONALISM TODAY

The two forms of European nationalism presented here are by no means

mutually exclusive. They may coexist within the same Europeanist movement, party, or policy. Their common denominator lies in a reexamination
of the bond between state and nation. This bond, formed slowly over the
course of history, seems to be unraveling.
Nation-states cannot make full use of their powers as long as politics,
including the politics of European elections, continues to be perceived
within an essentially narrow national frameworkdespite the operation

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187

of the economy at a worldwide level.19 Furthermore, the ability of the

nation-state to adapt itself to new modes of governance is again being
questioned. This brings us back to the question of citizen participation.
The state has not always existed, and it does not have to be the only
form of political expression that can legitimate control over all political,
economic, and social regulatory functions. If state sovereignty is limited
de facto by the effects of globalization, what purpose is there in defending it? Such is the essential predicament of European nationalism today.
This raises a delicate question: what could replace the nation-state if the
European Union is but the sum of nation-states?
The main problem is not the future of state sovereignty but the defense
of democracy within the European Union and within its member states.
The persistent debate between unionists and federalists should be a thing
of the past. It belongs to a historical phase in the construction of Europe
but is overdetermined by its own history. Outside the political structure
of the Union as it is currently constituted, the traditional meaning of
national sovereignty has been largely obliterated, even if the constitutional
texts of the member states still pay lip service to its continuing existence.
Often confused with the sovereignty of the state, national sovereignty
saw its field of application reduced as the Unions rights were increased.
It is therefore useless to continue to insist that national sovereignty is
incarnated by the state in the international arena and by the people within
the limits of the nation.
One solution, perhaps, would be to rethink and to revitalize popular sovereignty on a European scale in order to balance declining state
sovereignty and to maintain democratic participation within a postnational framework. For the European Union to become a social reality, objectively and emotionally, a real social European body must emerge, duly
represented by a Parliament with wide legislative powers. The present confusion about nationality and citizenship precludes this. History reminds
us that the two notions have more often been dissociated than associated.
Derived from the Latin natio, the term nationality did not originally
designate a state grouping of any sort. It was used merely to indicate the
provenance of individuals. By the eighteenth century, however, as a consequence of the creation and consolidation of the modern nation-state, a
19

It is necessary to relate the concept of modernity to what is now called globalization.

Fernand Braudel rightly pointed out that economic space has always overlapped political space even in the early-modern world. The correspondence between national political
structures and national economic structures was not properly established until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they have never coincided completely. Fernand
Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

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semantic shift had taken place, and the word acquired most of its modern
meanings. The Encyclopedie defined nation as a considerable number
of people who inhabit a certain extent of territory, enclosed within specific
limits and bound by a single government. Since the nineteenth century,
nation has come to describe two complementary elements: first, the infrastructure of a community (political, juridical, and above all emotional)
united by a common history and a shared set of values and, second,
allegiance to a state authority that rules over the territory on which the
inhabitants of that nation reside.
The most economical definition of citizenship is the rights derived
from, and the civic duties owed to, any given political community.
(Of course, the content of these rights and duties has constantly varied
over time.) A citizen was not merely a member of a community; he or
she also possessed the rightand the obligationto participate in the life
of the Res Publica. By the end of the nineteenth century, the relationship
between nationality and citizenship had been inverted: nationality conditioned citizenship. Only in the twentieth century, with the progressive
enlargement of the franchise, did all the members of the democratic nations acquire the full status of citizenship. (Women, in France, for instance
were not given the vote until 1944.)
Today the classical shape of the nation-state is changing. Why not,
therefore, try to define the characteristics of a postnational citizenship?

As Jurgen
Habermas has pointed out, if democratic citizenship doesnt
necessarily root itself in a national identity of the people, notwithstanding
a plurality of cultural forms, it requires nevertheless a socialisation of individuals in a common political culture.20 To be acceptable, this common
political culture cannot be associated with one national cultural model.
For its part, the successful emergence of a common European political
culture would suppose the existence of three conditions.
The first condition is the replacement of merely national politics by
means of a cultural program whose purpose would be to generate a new
form of allegiance, independent of the present nation-state structure. This
would necessarily involve the rewriting of most national histories as they
are currently conceived. The European Union should cease to be represented as the outcome of some teleological development toward a democratic consensus. It is instead the creation of an act of will and therefore should be, in Ernest Renans phrase, a daily plebiscite in order to
20

Jurgen
Habermas, Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future
Europe, Praxis Internationale 12 (1) (April 1992): 119.

European Nationalism and European Union

189

provide a substitute for that emotional dimension whose absence is one

of the causes of the famous democratic deficit.
Second, the European Union must make itself more accessible, and a
great deal more intelligible, to its members, most of whom at present
have very little idea of what it is and how it is constituted. Conversely,
however, a postnational European citizenship makes no sense so long as
there exists a clear distinction between nationality and citizenship. At
present the concept of a European people is highly unstable. Moreover,
according to Article 8 of the Maastricht Treaty, one can be a European
citizen only if one is also a citizen of the country in which one resides.
The constitutional innovation brought about by the treaty is a real one,
but it is also unbalanced because the rules of access to citizenship vary
from country to country. It is not possible to define the reciprocity of
the rights of Europeans while each country has its own conception of
what European nationality and European citizens mean. At present,
despite the ever-increasing power of the various European institutions,
a European state in the classical sense of the term does not exist. It
remains an open question whether a right without a state can create a
postnational citizenship.
Third, the current confusion between sovereignty and identity must
be resolved. Inherited, for the most part, from the struggle for national
emancipation, this confusion tends to obscure the distinction between cultural identity and political power. Yet if a postnational Europe is to exist,
it must be generally accepted that culturally different national communities can exist within the same political community. What is required if
this is to become a reality is one political frame of reference, but several
allegiances to different cultural orders.
European nationalism faces another difficulty as well. The deSovietization of Eastern Europe has raised a number of elementary questions. What is it to be European? Where now are Europes frontiers?
European history is more than the history of European unity. The instrumentalization of memory in the countries of Eastern European has
provoked a return of history. Every ethnic, religious, social, and political group claims a specific identity within a national identity that is
necessarily plural and therefore conflictual.
Beyond the political and economic problems created by the possible
enlargement of the European Union lies the necessity of creating strong
European symbols, strong enough to transcend self-regarding local identities. Since the eighteenth century, political nationalism has used culture
and cultural symbols to legitimate institutions and governments. Today,

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however, European nationalism is very far from its symbols. Apart from
a flag, a hymn, and a few festivals that occur only intermittently, the
European Union offers little that can inspire collective enthusiasm. It takes
longer to accept a symbol than a Brussels regulation, if it is accepted at
all. But it is the only way to ground a real European identity and, perhaps,
to limit the upsurge of aggressive national nationalisms. The European
Union must become a visual and compelling identity. It needs myths as
strong as those that sustain the individual nations of which it is composed.
As Condorcet observed, Citizens are not born; they are created through
instruction.21 Homo Europeanus is still waiting to be made.
21

Quoted by Catherine Withol de Wenden, La Citoyennete europeenne (Paris: Presses de

Sciences of Po, 1997), 88.

9
From the Ironies of Identity to the
Identities of Irony
LUISA PASSERINI

Europe, Europe as you watch me

descend helpless and lost into one of my
Frail myths among the hordes of beasts,
I am a son of yours in flight who has no
Enemy other than his own sadness.
Vittorio Sereni, Diario dAlgeria
August 1942

When this poem was written, Europe was in the midst of a civil war
between hordes of beasts (the Fascists) on one side and the anti-Fascists
on the other, and its fate depended on the outcome of this conflict. The
idea of a united Europe had been seized upon by both the Nazis and the
Fascists in the period between the two wars, as well as during the war itself.
Two examples of this are the Convegno Volta, a conference on Europe
organized in 1932 under the auspices of the Fascist regime in Rome and
the projects presented by Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop in 19423 for a
new Europe to be united under Nazi dominion.1 Those who resisted the
various types of Fascism and claimed to be sons of Europe could count
on only a frail mythif I may be allowed to extend Serenis metaphor
and this myth projected a possible Europe and possible Europeanness into
a completely uncertain future. At that time the sense of belonging to
Europe was more of a wager than a reference to a given reality.
An earlier version of this essay was published as the introduction to the anthology Identita` culturale europea: idee, sentimenti, relazioni (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1998). Poems
quoted in the text have been taken from Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 19451955,
edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi (Milano: Mondadori, 1996). The author thanks Nicki Owtram of the Language Centre at the European University Institute in
Florence for translating the poems into English.
1 Walter Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 1: Continental
Plans for European Union, 19391945 (BerlinNew York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985).

191

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LUISA PASSERINI

The tradition of a united Europe was centuries old, but the First World
War had reduced it to ashes. The many attempts to revive it between the
two wars included Richard Coudenhove-Kalergis Pan-Europe of 1923
and the proposal for a United States of Europe made to the League of
Nations by Aristide Briand.2 These efforts were accompanied by a wide
debate on the possibility of turning Europe into an autonomous cultural
and political subject, an alternative to the choice between the United States
and the Soviet Union or, for others, between the United States and Nazi
Germany. The Second World War dashed once again any hopes for this
tradition of a united Europe, but it contemporaneously gave rise to a new
wave of Europeanism. Taking the patrimony of debates on federalism in
Great Britain at the end of the thirties in organizations such as the Federal
Union,3 anti-Fascists imprisoned on the island of Ventotene drafted the
Manifesto, which proposed the idea of a European federation. This was
in the summer of 1941, exactly one year before the poem by Sereni was
composed. The Manifesto di Ventotene, as it became known, with its
stress on democracy and equality, reminds us of the legacy of ideas that
emerged during the European resistance.
In this chapter three levels of discussion will be identified: (1) the concrete procedure of the unification of Europe, (2) the different ideas and
ideologies regarding a united Europe, and (3) European cultural identity.
The link between the idea of a united Europe and the institutional reality of
the European Union has at times been underrated, as if the latter was simply the result of member states calculations to maintain their wealth and
security. Perry Anderson, however, has claimed that current European
construction is inexplicable if the federalist vision of Jean Monnet and
his small group of technocrats is not taken into account. Anderson has
also observed that ideas did indeed play a role in the history of European
integration. They were the result of the political and intellectual elites,
not of the popular masses. European public opinion began to emerge as
unanimous for the first time only after the collapse of the Soviet system,
thus apparently demonstrating approval for some degree of opening
toward the Eastern bloc. All the same, this opinion has been expressed
by the media, above all the press, rather than by the wider public or the
electorate. The problem of the different levels therefore intersects with
2

Carl Hamilton Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea, 19141932 (Chapel HillLondon:
University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Sergio Pistone, ed., Lidea dellunificazione
europea dalla prima alla seconda guerra mondiale (Torino: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi,
1975).
Andres Bosco, The Federal Idea, vol. 1: The History of Federalism from the Enlightenment
to 1945 (LondonNew York: Lothian Foundation Press, 1991).

From the Ironies of Identity

193

that of a potential European public sphere, where institutions, ideas, and

ways of feeling can exist in various and connected ways.4

THE IDEA OF EUROPE AND EUROPEAN IDENTITY

The construction of a united Europe began during the postwar period

and proceeded in stages from the founding of the European Economic
Community in 1957, to the election of the first European Parliament
with universal suffrage in 1979,5 to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. This
construction was accompanied by an increasing feeling of uncertainty over
just what it was that represented European particularity in the cultural
field and what it meant to be European. The great histories of the idea
of Europe, and the collections of documents and examples of the past
published in the twenty years following the Second World War, reflect a
much less problematic attitude toward the idea of a European specificity
than during the decades following this.6 It was during the sixties that
European identity began to be posed as a problem, together with the
debate on identitya term little used until the fifties. It began to be
used more frequently as a result of the new social, cultural, ethnic, and
regional movements.
As Robert Picht has written, identity can be compared to health: one
becomes aware of its disturbing elements only through the confrontation with transformations that throw into doubt its presumed normality.7
When human beings feel unrooted, they try to reassure themselves by
identifying enemies and dangers and by declaring their loyalty to collective organisms. Frequently, then, these identifications are of a regressive nature and express the need for self-protection against the unknown.
Indeed, I believe the growing debate about European identity and the
use of the term in appropriate and inappropriate contexts (many texts with
4

Perry Anderson, Under the Sign of the Interim, London Review of Books, vol. 18,
no. 1, 4 January 1966; and The Europe to Come, London Review of Books, vol. 18,
no. 2, 25 January 1966.
Edmondo Paolini, Lidea di Europa: Nascita e sviluppi (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1979);
and idem, La realta` Europa: dai trattati di Roma alla Federazione europea (Roma: Edime,
1983).
See Carlo Curcio, Europa. Storia di unidea (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1958); Federico Chabod,
Storia dellidea dEuropa (Bari: Laterza, 1961); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Lidee dEurope
dans lhistoire (Paris: Denoel, 1965); and Bernard Voyenne, Histoire de lidee europeenne
(Paris: Payot, 1964). See also Denis de Rougemont, Vingt-huit si`ecles dEurope (Paris:
Payot, 1961).
Robert Picht, Disturbed Identities: Social and Cultural Mutations in Contemporary
Europe, in Soledad Garcia, ed., European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy (London:
Pinter, 1993), 8194.

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L UISA P ASSERINI

the term in their title fail to offer any sustained discussion of it) are a sign
of uncertainty and discomfort on the one hand and regressive operations
to protect old values on the other.
In 1973 the European Community (as the Union was called when it
was composed of only nine members) issued a Declaration on European
Identity that was approved in Copenhagen. It represented an attempt
to define a European specificity despite the unavoidable contradictions
of Eurocentrism. The Declaration was based on the principles of the
unity of the Nine, on their responsibilities with regard to the rest of
the world, and on the dynamic nature of the construction of Europe.8
Admitting a diversity of cultures, the Declaration answered the basic
necessity to ensure the survival of the civilisation which [the Nine] have
in common. The identity of Europe, according to this document, should
be based on a common heritage: identical attitudes toward life, converging
on the creation of a society responding to the needs of individuals; the
principles of representative democracy, the rule of the law, social justice,
and respect for human rights. At this point, an essential part of Europes
supposed identity was represented by a common market based on a customs union, established institutions, as well as policies and machinery for
cooperation.
The first sections of the Declaration repeated presuppositions that
were already familiar and acceptable in the main. The rest of it established a hierarchy of relations with the rest of the world. The first aim
was to intensify ties with those European countries with whom friendly
and cooperative relations already existed. Then came the aim of maintaining and strengthening the historic links with the Mediterranean and
African countries and with the Middle East. The close ties with the
United Statesa country that shared the values and aspirations of a common heritagewere held to be mutually beneficial. They should be
preserved on the basis of equality and in a spirit of friendship. With
Japan and Canada close cooperation and constructive dialogue were
foreseen; with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the
countries forming the Eastern bloc, a policy of detente; with China,
exchanges in various fields; with other Asian countries, the extension
of already existing commercial relations; with Latin America, and in particular with several countries in the same area, an increase in friendly
relations. As for the less favoured nations, the Nine declared the
8

Declaration on European Identity, in Bulletin EC 12 (1973): 11822.

From the Ironies of Identity

195

importance of the struggle against under-development through trade

and financial aid. The last point announced that the European identity
will evolve as a function of the dynamic of the construction of a united
Europe.
The competitive and hierarchical nature of the Declaration has been
criticized on the grounds that in it relations with the rest of the world are
organized according to a descending scale from equality and friendship
to aid. Other criticisms concern the concept of identity and its legitimizing use in this context.9 The potentially flattening as well as normative
character of the concept of identity has sometimes led to a preference
for the terms identification or subjectivity.10 Here I will use the term
identity in order to participate in the debate around this term. Thus
its use will be critical and deconstructive, and I will attempt to avoid all
references to identity as a simple function or product of the European
Union or as a base that is instrumental for its legitimation.
The Declaration on European Identity highlights dangers implicit in
attaching the notion of European identity to the idea (and the reality)
of a united Europe. Connections between the two clearly do exist, but
each remains relatively independent of the other. The theme of a united
Europe is in force in the political, social, economic, and cultural fields,
while identity refers to a field that is at the same time wider and narrower.
Identity moves from everyday life in its material and emotional aspects
to high and low cultural forms of the elites and the masses. The
advantage of keeping separate the identity and the idea of Europeone
of the main themes of this chapteris that in this way the discourse on
European identity can keep its distance from political projects and their
realization. The tension that derives from this allows a reciprocal critical
attention between such discourse and such projects.
A similar distance must be maintained between the historical forms of
European identity and forms that are possible for the future. Attempts to
found the future forms on cultural characteristics that are already given
cannot but give rise to a sense of unease over the resulting appropriation,
or the incongruity of the past with respect to the present. The central example of this is the identification of Europe with modernity and progress,
9

10

Lutz Niethammer, Konjunkturen und Konkurrenzen kollektiver Identitaet, in

Philosophische Fakultaet Antrittsvorlesungen I (Jena: Friedrich Schiller Universitaet,
1967), 169215.
Homi Bhabha, The Third Space, in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 20721; and Luisa Passerini,
Storia e soggettivita` (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1988).

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an equation at least as old as the Enlightenment. Europe, however, is no

longer at the center or the vanguard of modernity.11 This identification
has, therefore, lost its meaning.
In reaction to the loss of old identifications, the trend has been not to
search for one single value capable of organizing an entire cultural universe, but to choose a way by which to accumulate various specificities.
One example of this is an interesting attempt in Denmark at the beginning of the sixties to analyze European ideasa long list of concepts
including modern science, Christianity, human rights, evolution, imperialism, the subconscious, youth revolt, and so on.12 Or consider the list
of adjectives used by Richard Hoggart and Douglas Johnson to connote
the European continent: fragile, restless, contradictory, inconsistent.13
To what other continents could they not also apply? The problem is that
comparisons in which a clear definition of the second term is missing have
always been a characteristic of Eurocentrism. Definitions of identity based
on such conceptions run the risk of reproducing rhetorical formulae that
are either empty or suspect.
Even European ideology, defined by Norberto Bobbio as centered
on the government of liberty, the antithesis of which was for centuries
Oriental Despotism, has worn out in the second half of this century.14
So has a sense of guilt linked to the experiences of totalitarianism and
decolonialization. One can only agree with Bronislaw Geremek when
he rejects claims, based on the presupposition that totalitarian systems
would be a total negation of the European tradition, that the Nazi system
and the Gulag archipelago flagrantly contradict the spirit and sentiment of
Europe.15 On the contrary, the dialectics of the Enlightenment typical
of the European tradition should be accepted, which includes the contemporaneous development of terror and emancipation, and therefore a
central role in the European memory should be assigned to the Shoah
and other processes of persecution and emargination. However, a collective memory of all this presents itself today as a difficult and dangerous
battlefield in which opposing identities may well arise.
11
12
13
14
15

Goran
Therborn, Modernita` sociale in Europa (19501993), in Storia dEuropa,
vol. 1: LEuropa oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 461613.
Erik Lund, Pihl Morgens, and Johannes Slok, eds., A History of European Ideas (London:
Hurst & Co., 1962).
Richard Hoggart and Douglas Johnson, An Idea of Europe (London: Chatto, 1987).
Norberts Bobbio Grandezza e decadenza dellideologia europea, in Lettera internazionale 3 (1986): 15.
Bronislaw Geremek, LEuropa e la sua memoria, in LAteneo, XIII, 2 (1967), 219 and
Idem, Le radici comuni dellEuropa (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1991).

From the Ironies of Identity

197

It is no coincidence that, in order to emerge from the aporiae of

European identity, a pattern of insistence on a characterization that seems
to pertain more to formality than to content has continued to develop:
that of so-called European multiplicity. The tradition of Europe as a
unitas multiplex is a long one. Take, for example, Diderot. Under the
entry for Legislateur in the Encyclopedie, he wrote on the diversity of
European governmentsrepublics and monarchiesthat gave rise to a
wide range of sentiments and customs. Diderot believed that as a result
of such diversity in Europe, wars would always occur (il y aura toujours
des guerres en Europe). Recently, the theme of the diversity of Europe
has been reopened in connection with historical phenomena such as the
fall of the Soviet regime, the accompanying explosions of nationalisms
and regionalisms, the growing number of member states in the European
Union, and the new waves of migrants from the East and the South. The
diversity theme has reappeared in the context of an intercultural understanding and has lent itself to new interpretations.
The very title of Hans-Georg Gadamers 1985 essay Die Vielfalt
Europas (The Diversity of Europe) confirms the thesis that Europe has
always been characterized by such linguistic variety as to oblige it to undertake the hard task of learning coexistence. According to Gadamer, the
cultural destiny of Europe was formed through the distinction and dialectics between various areas of human creativity, in particular between
philosophy and science. Science lay at the base of a coherent European
identity. The situation in China was very different: None of the great
masters there could be called a poet rather than a thinker or a theologian
rather than a knower.16 The general objective outlined by Gadamer was
to experience the other and the others, as the other of our self, in order
to participate with one another.17 Today that objective and the intermediate one of developing the heritage of regions and single groups and their
ways of life in order to oppose the tendency toward leveling out are important. Yet the statement that the spiritual unity of Europe is already
a reality as well as a duty, where the terms reality and duty seem to
be placed on the same level, is unacceptable.18 The concrete existence of
a spiritual unity has been clamorously belied by the historical events of
the twentieth century. Moreover, this kind of claim goes against modern
16

17
18

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Diversity of Europe: Inheritance and Future, in

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 225.
Ibid., 238.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leredita` dellEuropa (Torino: Einaudi, 1991).

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sensitivity. If we want to avoid all risks of essentialism, spiritual unity

neither can nor should be taken for granted; it can only be understood
and undertaken as a duty, mainly in regard to the future and always with
a critical approach to the forms that have preceded it.
Gadamers elegant formulation succeeds, however, in avoiding the triumphalism, almost the self-satisfaction, that less shrewd versions of
European multiplicity exhibit. One version of this, exemplified by Paul
Hazards La crise de la conscience europeenne (The European Mind),19
is the definition of the European as a multiform and evolutive personality determined by an ideal, a definition connected to the concept of the
European conscience as an incessant search for happiness and truth.20
Another case is that of the interpretation of the unity and multiplicity of
Europe offered by Cees Noteboom in Come si diventa europei? (How
does one become a European?), a reference not only to the polyphonous
chorus of European languages and the resulting polyhedral experience of
learning them, but also to a hybrid lifestyle that derives from spending the
winter in Amsterdam and Berlin and the summer in Spain.21 No longer
is it possible to share this facile optimism about such privileged experiences, even if they do follow experiences of oppression and positions of
resistance. In reality, such statements simply reflect a nostalgia for the
ease with which it was possible to travel in Europe without a passport
before the First World War. One only has to think of the experience of
migrants, whose migrations have been undertaken for reasons of political
or economic necessity, for the multiplicity of languages to take on quite
another meaning.
Ursula Hirschmann, one of the founders of the European Federalist
Movement at the beginning of the forties and the founder of the group
known as Femmes pour lEurope in 1970, focused her attention on this
experience. In a political meeting she suddenly understood why it was
so much easier for her to be European than for the others: I had to
speak, and I realised that I could not do so in even one language. She
had lost, as it were, her German mother tongue, which had become flat
and unflexible as a result of living abroad for so long, while Italian,
the language in which her children had been brought up, felt foreign to
her. After likening herself to a Jewish friend in the sense that he was a
wandering European, Hirschmann concluded with a declaration of the
Europeanization of the rootless. We deracines of Europe, who have
crossed the borders more often than we have changed our shoes (Brecht),
19
20
21

Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience europeenne 16801715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961).

Philippe Moreau Defarges, LEurope et son identite dans le monde (Paris: S.T.H., 1983).
Cees Noteboom, Come si diventa europei? (Milano: Linea dombra, 1994), 15.

From the Ironies of Identity

199

have nothing to lose, she writes, than our chains in a federalist Europe,
and so it is that we are federalists.22 The multiplicity of languages in
Europe is expressed here in terms of suffering and alienation, of rootlessness and loss that have been the lot of many in the European history of
the twentieth century. A list of these people would include Jews, women,
immigrants from within and beyond Europe, refugees, the dispersed, and
the uncultured. This partial list of others, historically present in
Europe in a subordinate and conflictual position, suggests that a break is
necessary: a gesture of radical discontinuity needs to be made before one
can make a credible claim that the diversity of the European continent is
valuable.
As a result, the problem of European identity accepts the solution offered by the formula of multiple identity only as a first approximation.
In reference to Europeanness, Anthony Smith, among others, notes that
the number and extension of currently possible cultural identities have
increased.23 Identities based on gender and generation remain vital, and
even those based on class and religion continue to be influential. In addition, professional, civic, and ethnic identities have proliferated, attracting
increasingly large groups from all over the world. While national identification is still frequently the political and cultural norm that transcends
and organizes other loyalties, human beings maintain a multiplicity of
belongings that tend to push the national one into the background. In
regard to this central problem, the concept of multiple identity limits
itself to underlining the quality of tolerance and to expressing possibilities. It remains, however, conceptually undifferentiated and undefined, as
does its correlate, multiculturalism. Both terms, and the concepts to which
they refer, lack a sufficiently explicit description of the power disparity
between the subjects and the forms of subjectivity that they denote.
Given this situation, it is not surprising that the notion of a truly contemporary European identity is occasionally denied; according to some,
no sentiment of European identity is in line with the modernization of
continental affairsa view seemingly confirmed by the fact that Europe
is only marginally present in school curricula.24 According to others,
the European consciousnesshowever defined or justifiedis none other
that a form of group partiality, a kind of nationalism on a vast scale
that includes some and excludes others, thereby negating every authentic
22
23
24

Ursula Hirschmann, Noi senza patria (Bologna: il Mulino, 1993), 212.

Anthony Douglas Smith, National Identity and the Idea of European Unity, in International Affairs 68 (1992): 5576.
Sven Papcke, Who Needs European Identity and What Could It Be? in Brian Nelson,
David Roberts, and Walter Veit, eds., The Idea of Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 6174.

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universalism.25 These negative opinions are often based on the impossibility of developing a European identity with the same level of emotional impact as that made by national identities. Yet, as Hartmut Kaeeble and Gian
Enrico Rusconi have reminded us in two different ways, this is not the
real problem.26
EUROPE AND ITS OTHERS
Signatures are not enough
appeals are of no use
to rid us of our smooth guilt;
the intellectual is guilty, for centuries Europe
with its principles has been guilty, the missionary
who preaches resignation is guilty, the state
which preaches segregation is guilty, the army
which crushes to be obedient is guilty.
Racial hatred plunges down onto us once more.
Nelo Risi, Dentro la sostanza, 1965

These lines and the date on which they were publishedin the middle of
a decade characterized by anti-imperialist struggles worldwidereflect
a distancing from Eurocentric attitudes that has continued well beyond
this period, even if in ways that are sometimes blunted and submerged.
Indeed, this distancing may be one of the main impediments to developing
a concept that can advance a positive proposal for a European identity.
Eurocentric attitudes continue to exist more or less implicitly, however.
Although they were rejected, they were never discussed or analyzed in
any great detail. Above all, their rejection was a reaction to the criticism
that came from beyondthat is, from those who had been designated as
others by the Eurocentric subject: what characterised the experience
of the Europeans was also the experience of its victims.27
On the cultural level the victims were often made such in the course
of processes of assimilation that at the same time privileged and recompensed them, thus rendering the use of the term victim incongruous at
first sight. Indeed, the Other was often to be found within Europe itself.
25

26

27

Nico Wilterdink, An Examination of European and National Identity, Archives

europeennes de sociologie, XXXIV, 1 (1993), 11936. See also Ariane Chebel
dAppollonias chapter in this volume.
Gian Enrico Rusconi, Cittadinanza e costituzione, in Luisa Passerini, ed., Identita`
culturale europea, 13353; and Hartmut Kaeeble, Periodizzazione e tipologia, in ibid.,
2946.
Jack Goody, La cultura europea nel secolo XX, in Storia dEuropa, vol. 1: LEuropa
oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 815.

From the Ironies of Identity

201

In order to understand the process of Europeanization from this viewpointas a leveling down of other cultures to the Western oneit is useful to read the criticism, drafted in Moscow in 190910 and published
in Sofia in 1920, that Trubeckoj made of Eurocentric attitudes. Only by
means of a negative orientation such as the kind that he proposed,
which tends to place the reader in front of a void,28 can a process that
today would be called deconstructionist be initiated, as the initial premise
for a process of subsequent construction whose direction cannot be prefigured except by its protagonists. Even for Trubeckoj, the essay in which
both egocentricism and eccentrism (the placing of the center beyond oneself, in this case into Western Europe) were rejected formed only the first
part of a trilogyunfinished on account of his premature death.
The controversy over the eastern border of Europe goes back centuries,
but the formula from the Atlantic to the Urals still has not lost its attraction. As the process that began in 1989 of dismantling the Soviet empire
and reunifying the two Germanies and potentially Europe suggests, federative events to date have been based on Western Europe alone. This has
made the question of what it means to be European even more difficult
to answer. The war in the former Yugoslavia tragically illustrates the possibility and reality of inter-European conflicts of all dimensions. All this
accentuates the need for distance between the European construction on
the one hand and identity as a dimension of culture and subjectivization
on the other. What kind of Europeanness is capable of embracing both the
West and the East (including Russia) in cultural terms? This question should
be explored immediately. Similarly, there exists no immediate obstacle
to suggestions as to how best to integrate scattered items and common
experiences without, at the same time, negating the discontinuity of the
continent (as has been shown visually by the beautiful atlas of Central
and Eastern Europe by Michel Foucher).29
For many years forms of European identity were built up through contrasts, such as Orientalism versus Occidentalism.30 Europes Other
varied from an image of Asia, to an image of Africa, to an image of
Americaor of peoples of these continents. Europeans ambivalence
28

29
30

Nikolai Trubeckoj, LEuropa e lumanita` (Torino: Einaudi, 1982). In these essays both
egocentricism and eccentrism (the placing of the center beyond oneself, in this case into
Western Europe) were rejected. The essays formed the first part of a trilogy that remained
unfinished because of the authors premature death.
Michel Foucher, ed., Fragments dEurope: Atlas de leurope mediane et orientale (Paris:
Fayard, 1993).
Richard J. Mayne, The Europeans: Who Are We? (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1972).

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toward these others manifested itself in two different but indivisible relations. One is the area of concrete relations (political, military, socioeconomic, and missionary) with non-European peoples through colonial
expansion. The other is the area of the imagination, which created images deriving not from observation or experience but from psychological
drives.31 The Other was therefore both the primitive, considered as a
holder of positive values with which to rejuvenate a corrupt civilization
and a touchstone for the level of progress reached by Europe, and the
savage to be exploited, converted, and civilized. The very translation
of customs and attitudes of others into the languages of Europewith
their own metaphors, stylistic characteristics, and forms of inertiawas
a way of assimilation that took place through the accounts of travelers,
missionaries, and anthropologists.32
The figure of the Other was projected onto the country that overtook
Europe on the road to modernity and progressthe United States. This
projection was so strong that it created in Europe persistent trends of antiAmericanism.33 In reality, these trends are often ways to claim ex negativo
forms of European identity or to express the crisis in which the very idea
of Europe now found itself. It is for this reason that the concept of the
West, which includes Europe and North America and particularly the
United States, is ambiguous and conflictual. For this reason it deserves further investigation in order to clarify the aporiae and contradictions that
historically have been at the base of the European identity. One part of
the negative patrimony constituted by the European representations of
Others can be reversed and translated so as to endow with value the processes of cultural interaction and remind us that an implicit Europeanness
can frequently become consciousespecially for the strata of the population that are less or not at all intellectualonly through the experience
of migration or travel to other continents.
The contributions made by subaltern studies, in particular the
emphasis placed on the positionality of any scientific view, are essential to understand the relationship between Europe and its Others.34
It would also seem useful to make use of the discourse on critical
31
32
33

34

Ernest Henri Philippe Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images
of Non-European Man (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1965).
Talal Asad and J. Dixon, Translating Europes Others, in Europe and Its Others, vol. 1
(Colchester: University of Essex, 1984).
See Michela Nacci, Lantiamericanismo in Italia negli anni trenta (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1986); and idem, La barbarie del comfort. Il modello di vista americano nella
cultura francese del 900 (Milano: Guerini, 1996).
Gavatri C. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Nelson Cary and Larry Crossberg,
eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988), 271313.

From the Ironies of Identity

203

ethnocentricism proposed by Ernesto De Martino in Italy. For De Martino, European centrisminasmuch as it has always made reference
to a privileged relation with the divinehas excluded confrontation between human beings and has compromised the fight against the dispersion of peoples. In contrast, the unification of peoples and cultures
presents itself as a concrete duty and a task that we must fulfill, not as a
plan pre-established by God or materialism, for any history is constantly
at risk of losing any kind of sense without the active intervention of human beings. The onset of this task is based on a twofold presupposition.
First, one cannot help being ethnocentric. Second, one can make critical
use of Western interpretative categories by going beyond the scandal
of reciprocal incomprehension, the extreme scarcity of common memories, and by accepting the sentiment of guilt and remorse towards the
separated brother. The objective is therefore neither a dogmatic Eurocentricism nor an unrelated cultural relativism but a critical European
centrism aimed at founding a new solidarity in human relations on our
planet.35
While I agree entirely with De Martinos idea that in this undertaking
it is not a question of eliminating the West but of questioning it deeply,
and of becoming aware of the limits of its humanism, which to date
has been corporative, I also believe that it is no longer possible (as it
probably was at the beginning of the sixties) to give back to the West
its compromised hegemonic power.36 De Martinos proposal, however,
must be corrected in the sense that the loss of the role that Europe held as
center must be fully admitted to the benefit of the search for its cultural
specificities and without any pretensions of superiority. What is left as
ethnocentric is the point of view of the individual and her story, connoted
by belonging to a certain gender, generation, and social and geographical
collocation.37
This approach stakes out a perspective for cultural identity that locates
the Other within the subject,38 and it links identity with alterity. The break
with the expectation of the superiority of ones own tradition is accompanied by the assertion of ones heritage and the possibility of correcting this assertion through the reciprocity of intercultural exchanges. For
example, the value of peacemediated by the consideration of other
35
36
37
38

Ernesto De Martino, La fine del mondo: contributo allanalisi delle apocalissi culturali
(Torino: Einaudi, 1977), 393.
Ibid., 352.
Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Aspects of Cultural History in 1930s
Britain (London: Tauris, 1998).
`
Romano Madera,
LAlchimia ribelle (Bari: Palomar, 1997).

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world cultures and by European minoritiescan be integrated into the

European tradition, which has been mainly warlike, sparing only the wars
of the critical spirit and claiming from our past only the arms of criticism
while rejecting the criticism done through arms. From this perspective
European cultural identity would be able to take a step forward toward the world and make a commitment for the unification of humanity,
although no longer in the guise of a counterposition or a hegemony. Such
a step would act as a reversal of most of European history and as a duty
to be undertaken toward the future.
From this view, the proposals for Europe and its institutions to act as
intermediaries between local, regional, national, and global levels make
sense. It also becomes meaningful to situate the cultural dimension of the
European project between national or local revivals and cultural aspirations of a global dimension.39 This kind of position renders obsolete the
old debate between pan-Europeans and anti-Europeans (today the latter are often dressed up as Eurosceptics) and proposes a solution to the
twofold need to render justice to universalistic aspirations and to find
cultural roots.40
BEING EUROPEAN
Milan has sunsets of red gold.
One viewpoint just like another
were the vegetable gardens of the suburbs
after the large houses of the Umanitaria.
Between hedges of sambuco and some small doorways
made of tin and broken shutters
the smell of a coffee factory
together with the distant sound of the foundries.
Because of that rust which reigned invisible
because of that sun which set larger
in Piedmont in France who knows where
it felt as though I was in Europe;
my mother knew very well
that I wouldnt be staying with her for much longer
and yet she smiled
against a background of dahlias and clustered violets.
Luciano Erba, Lippopotamo, 1989
39
40

Smith, National Identity.

Jacques Lenoble, Penser lidentite et la democratie en Europe, in Jacques Lenoble
and Nicole Dewandre, eds., LEurope au soir du si`ecle (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1992),
293315.

From the Ironies of Identity

205

From the viewpoint of the history of mentalities and attitudes, few peoples
have held themselves to be at the center of a European specificity; most
peoples have experienced and continue to experience Europe as something
to which they belong, but where they also feel they represent something
separate. This was true for many years of Great Britain,41 but also of
Portugal and Spain, and certainly of Greece.42 European identity has long
included hierarchies and exclusionsa Europe-Europe and a lesser
Europe.43 Although in the last few decades the conviction that the center
and the periphery are now everywhere has become stronger, for many the
sense of not forming a full part of Europe is still marked. This sensation
can be linked to the difficulties of participating in the European Union,
a participation that is rendered problematic by, for example, monetary
unification. It is not, however, only a matter of a reaction to material
problems: there is also, and not only in Italy, the attribution of an ideal
and normative value to Europe, as though taking an active part in it meant
freeing oneself from weaknesses, public vices, and national ills.
In Italy great political and idealistic value has always been attributed
to the Europeanness of the country and its culture, although in a dreamlike way, as in the poem just cited.44 Today there is stillor perhaps it has
simply resurfaceda utopian coloring linked to the idea of entering Europe
or keeping pace with Europe or managing to catch the European
train, some of the many metaphors in the debate on the constitution
of forms of collaboration between the countries of the Union. Thus, a
hope has been expressed. It has spread throughout daily life and into the
opinions of the public at large. This hope may irritate the Eurosceptics,
but it stimulates cultural historians.
That Europe catalyzes strong hopes, including hopes for the introduction of the private into the political and the integration of a female politics with equal rights on the same footing as male politics,45
should not be seen as a political program capable of being acted upon
41
42

43
44
45

See Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe.

See Michael Herzfelds chapter in this volume and Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy:
Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New YorkLondon: Routledge, 1997). With reference
to the comment about Portugal and Spain, see Eduardo Lourenco, LEurope introuvable:
jalons pour une mythologie europeenne (Paris: Metailie, 1991); Francisco Lucas Pires,
O que e Europa (Lisboa: Diffusao Cultural, 1992); and Luis Diez del Corral, El rapto
de Europa (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1954).
Lourenco, LEurope introuvable, 73.
Sergio Pistone, ed., LItalia e lunita` europea dalle premesse storiche allelezione del parlamento europeo (Torino: Loescher, 1982).
`
Karin Hausen, Individuo-societa-Stato:
la questione femminile, 61534, in Storia
dEuropa, vol. 1: LEuropa oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 643.

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immediately, but rather as a cultural condition revealing the potential of

a united Europe, which can then diversify and move in different directions. The results may well depend on the kind of cultural commitment
made by intellectuals, teachers, and cultural operators. There can be
no doubt, for example, that pedagogic activity with regard to Europe
in forms that include its emotional and relational aspects is virtually
nonexistent in schools. However, the question of what to teach about
Europe and its possible cultural identity is now being raised in secondary
schools.46
In conclusion, I shall return to the discourse on European cultural identity, assuming that we have now moved sufficiently toward that other
heading (to use the title of an essay by Derrida on the theme of identity).
Europe, claims Derrida, has always recognised itself as a cape of headland. 47 The first heading was Europe itself, what Nietzsche, in Beyond
Good and Evil, called that small prominent peninsula which wishes
at all costs to represent itself as mankinds progress with respect to
Asia. Moving to the other heading, therefore, could mean renouncing
the claim to being the vanguard of progress and center of knowledge, and
accepting that ones position can be found only on the other side.
In relation to this, Derridas criticism of Valery is extremely significant.
Valery had expressed what we might call the Eurocentric paradox: our
special quality (sometimes our ridicule, but often our finest claim or title)
is to believe and to feel that we are universalby which I mean: men
of universality. . . . Notice the paradox: to specialise in the sense of the
universal.48 Derridas response implies that to be men of universality
cannot be the exclusive right of the Europeans, and he highlights the choice
that even today divides the European conscience: to accept foreigners by
assimilating them or to accept their otherness.
Derrida ends by accepting something of the multiple identity: I am
not, nor do I feel, European in every part, that is, European through
and through. He continues, my cultural identitythat in the name
of which I speakis not only European, it is not identical to itself. . . .
I feel European among other things. . . . [I]t is up to the others, and up to
me among them, to decide.49 Multiplicity has here acquired a twofold
46
47

48

Margaret Shennan, Teaching about Europe (London: Cassell, 1991).

Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 20. This is a translation of LAutre Cap
(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991). In French cap may mean a heading, in the sense of
direction, or a headland or promontory.
49 Ibid., 823.
Derrida, The Other Heading, 74.

From the Ironies of Identity

207

meaning. Firstly, in regard to European identity, belonging to the continent is not only not interpreted as being dominant, that is to say, it is
not the value that hierarchically organizes a whole set of other values (as
used to be the case, for instance, with the value of work in the phenomenology of oral and written autobiographies). Secondly, identity can
include within the category of European the fact of being born in Africa,
being male and of Jewish origin, as well as belonging to a certain generation and social class. This will hold, however, only if these definitions are
not thrown together higgledy-piggledy in an exaltation of undifferentiated multiplicitybeing European among other thingsbut instead lead
to being among the others and to taking on roles that have traditionally
been assigned to those who for many years represented the Other, such as
Jews, women, and immigrants, and therefore siding with those who are
today cast in the role of representing the Other.
Framing this perception in terms of the feminist tradition, Rosi Braidotti
has written that European identity has always been a notion fraught with
contradictions and has never been One. Indeed, its alleged unity was
at best a poor fiction.50 She believes that it has forged its position during
the course of history as the center, not only of the world economy but also
of thought, knowledge, and science. At the symbolic and discursive level,
this implies that others are peripheral and underrated. At the roots of
Braidottis feeling of Europeanness is not the triumphant assumption
of a sovereign identity but rather the disenchanting experience of disidentifying myself with sovereignty all together. The Europe to which she
feels she belongs is the place of possible forms of resistance to the systematic devaluation of the Other and to the destructive conflicts to which this
leads. To be European today is an expression typical of both Ursula
Hirschmann and Braidotti. For Braidotti it means positioning herself
within the historical contradictions of a European identity and experiencing the political need to turn them into spaces of critical resistance
to hegemonic identities of all kinds.51 Despite the fact that the subject
of feminist nomadism falls into the trap of triumphalism when she exalts the joyful nomadic force, the position that Braidotti proposesof
resistance to our pastis a primary stage in the criticism of the European
cultural heritage.
According to Agnes Heller, although it may be true that Europeans are
old, Europe is itself still young given that a European culture as such has
50
51

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary

Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 910.
Ibid., 8.

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never existed but it could develop in the future.52 This projection toward
the future is a constant in the approach proposed in this chapter, and it is
from this point of view that I now draw a conclusion. Situated between positions that either completely negate the possibility of a European identity
and those that formalize it within a community already possessed of values and attitudes, and expressive of a single European spirit, this chapter
has attempted to describe forms of identity that are problematic, critical,
and linked to a nonsovereign subject.53 Such forms are not based on
exclusion or on a contrast with others, but recognize differences within
ourselves, our worlds, and the world. This presupposes maintaining the
tension between knowledge and practice, politics and culture, ideas and
emotions, as well as searching incessantly for their links. In addition, it
means being aware of the foundational character of intersubjectivity as a
horizon for new identities, and a readiness to welcome the new-born (in
the Arendtian sense) from future generations, as well as foreignersin
the many senses of the termwithout losing a sense of ones self and the
direction of ones own itinerary.
The title of this chapter refers to two kinds of detachment. The first
is necessary in order to recognize the aporiae, nemesis, and tricks that
the fate of Europe has played on the identities linked with it. The second
is indispensable to capture the tension between the self and the self, and
between the self and the otherboth inside and outside us. This last point
reminds us of the links between identities and masks (personae). To act
one or more parts on a stage composed of concentric circlesthe city, the
country, Europe, the worldcannot be separated from an attitude that
is ironic, at least in part, toward the performance and ones role within
it. To express the hope that these futures will be identities of irony means
hoping that they will be strong enough to oscillate, move, and change and
that they will be able to avoid the need to base themselves on rigidity and
exclusionas did those created in times of economic scarcity and cultural
contraposition. It also means hoping that they will always allow irony to
be shown both toward themselves and toward the illusions of grandeur
and the hegemonic expectations of the old subject.
52
53

Agnes Heller, Europe: An Epilogue, in Brian Nelson, David Roberts, and Walter Veit,
eds., The Idea of Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 25.
Bhabha, The Third Space.

10
Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe
Represent Islam?
TALAL ASAD

Simultaneously, and despite the parochialism of the governments at

home, a sort of international solidarity was slowly evolving in the
colonies. . . . Out of interest if not out of good will, an embryonic European
understanding had at last been found in Africa. We could hate one another
in Europe, but we felt that, between two neighboring colonies, the interest
in common was as great as between two white men meeting in the desert.
Count Carlo Sforza, Europe and Europeans, 1936

Muslims are present in Europe and yet absent from it. The problem of
understanding Islam in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how Europe is conceptualized by Europeans. Europe (and
the nation-states of which it is constituted) is ideologically constructed in
such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot be satisfactorily represented
in it. I argue that they are included within and excluded from Europe at
one and the same time in a special way.
I take it for granted that in Europe today Muslims are often misrepresented in the media and discriminated against by non-Muslims.1 More
interesting for my present argument is the anxiety expressed by the majority of West Europeans about the presence of Muslim communities and
Islamic traditions within the borders of Europe. (In France, for example,
a 1992 poll showed that two-thirds of the population feared the presence
of Islam in that country.2 ) It is not merely that the full incorporation of
Muslims into European society is thought to be especially hard for people
Michael Blim, William Connolly, Vincent Crapanzano, Heiko Henkel, Aseel Sawalha, David
Scott, and Gerry Sider commented on this essay at various points. I am grateful to them.
1 See J. Wrench and J. Solomos, eds., Racism and Migration in Western Europe (Oxford:
Berg, 1993), esp. the excellent contribution by S. Castles.
2 See A. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London:
Routledge, 1995), 119.

209

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TALAL ASAD

who have been brought up in an alien culture. It is their attachment to

Islam that many believe commits Muslims to values that are an affront to
the modern Western form of life.
Admittedly, there is no shortage of voices that respond to such anxieties
with characteristic liberal optimism.3 They speak of the diverse linguistic
and ethnic origins of Muslim immigrants, and of the considerable variation in individual attachments to old traditions. There is little to fear
from most immigrantsliberals sayand much more from the consequences of the higher unemployment and greater prejudice to which they
are subjected. Muslims in Europe can be assimilated into Western society.
Liberals maintain that it is only the extreme right for whom the presence of
Muslims and Islam in Europe represents a potential cultural disaster, and
that right-wing xenophobia is rooted in the romantic nativism it espouses,
and consequently in its rejection of the Wests universalist principles. In
this, as in other matters, liberals stand for tolerance and an open society.
All these claims may be true, but the liberal position is more layered
than one might suppose. To begin with, the Islamic disregard of the principle of secular republicanism (as symbolized by the affaire du foulard),
and the Islamic attack against the principle of freedom of speech
(as exemplified in the Rushdie affair) have angered liberals and the left no
less than the extreme right. These events within Europe have been read as
all of a piece with the Islamist resort to civil violence in North Africa and
West Asia, and they have led even liberals to ask with growing skepticism
whether the Islamic tradition (as distinct from its human carriers) can find
a legitimate place in a modern Western society.
But I begin elsewhere. I focus not on liberal opposition to right-wing
intolerance or dismay at the closedmindedness of immigrants but with
a larger question. How can contemporary European practices and discourses represent a culturally diverse society of which Muslim migrants
(Pakistanis in Britain, Turks in Germany, North Africans in France) are
now part? To answer this question I shall first address another: How
is Europe represented by those who define themselves as authentic
Europeans?
The general preoccupation in the social sciences with the idea of identity dates from after the Second World War. It marks a new sense of
3

Many of these voices are found in recent collections: B. Lewis and D. Schnapper, eds.,
Muslims in Europe (London: Pinter, 1994); S. Z. Abedin and Z. Sardar, eds., Muslim Minorities in the West (London: Grey Seal, 1995); G. Nonneman, T. Niblock, and
B. Szajkowski, eds., Muslim Communities in the New Europe (London: Ithaca Press,
1996).

Muslims and European Identity

211

the word, highlighting the individuals social locations and psychological crises in an increasingly uncertain world.4 This is my name, we
now declare. I need you to recognize me by that name. More than
ever before identity depends on the others recognition of the self. Previously, the more common meaning of identity was sameness, as in
the statement that all Muslims do not have identical interests, and
attributively, as in identity card. In Europe the newer twist on the
sense of the word is almost certainly more recent than in America. Perhaps in both places the discourse of identity indicates not the rediscovery of ethnic loyalties so much as the undermining of old certainties.
The site of that discourse is suppressed fear. The idea of European identity, I say, is not merely a matter of how legal rights and obligations
can be reformulated. Nor is it simply a matter of how a more inclusive name can be made to claim loyalties that are attached to national
or local ones. It concerns exclusions and the desire that those excluded
recognize what is included in the name one has chosen for onself. The
discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about nonEuropeans.
MUSLIMS AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE

What kind of identity, then, does Europe represent to Europeans? An

empirical response would base itself on comprehensive research into literature, popular media, parliamentary debates, and local interviews. My
primary interest, however, is in analyzing the logic of a discourse rather
than in tracing its empirical spread. So I begin with a partial answer to the
question. Consider this anecdote as reported in the 1992 Time magazine
cover story on Turkeys attempt to become a member of the European
Community:
However it may be expressed, there is a feeling in Western Europe, rarely stated
explicitly, that Muslims whose roots lie in Asia do not belong in the Western
family, some of whose members spent centuries trying to drive the Turks out of
a Europe they threatened to overwhelm. Turkish membership would dilute the
E.C.s Europeanness, says one German diplomat.5
4

Philip Gleason points out that the first edition of the International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, published in 19305, carried no entry under the term identity, and that
one appeared only in the 1968 edition. See Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,
The Journal of American History, vol. 69, no. 4 (1983): 91031.
Across the Great Divide, Time, October 19, 1992, 31.

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T ALAL A SAD

Clearly, neither the genocide practiced by the Nazi state nor its attempt
to overwhelm Europe have led to feelings in Western Europe that would
cast doubt on where Germany belongs. I do not make this statement
in a polemical spirit. On the contrary, I affirm that given the idea of
Europe that exists, such violence cannot dilute Germanys Europeanness.
Violence isamong other thingsa complicated moral language. Far
from being threatened by internal violence, European solidarity is strengthened by it.
Let me explain: Tony Judt powerfully argues that the idea of Europe
stands as a convenient suppressor of collective memories of the widespread
collaboration with Nazi crimes in East and West alike, as well as of mass
brutalities and civil cruelties for which all states were directly or indirectly
responsible.6 His account has nothing to say, however, about violence perpetrated in this period by Europeans outside Europein colonial Africa,
say, or in the Middle East. No mention is made even of Algeria, which
was, after all, an internal Department of France. I stress that my comment here is not moralistic but descriptive. It has to do with how the
conceptual boundaries of moral and legal solidarity are actually traced.
I do not object to Judts leaving colonial violence out of his discussion.
I merely point to what he thinks is important. I indicate that his discussion
of collective culpability is limited in precisely the way that the myth of
Europe defines the extent of its own solidarity. The myth of Europe
does not simply suppress the collective memories of violence within
Europe; the resurrection of those memories strengthens that myth. Moral
failure is considered particularly shameful in this case because Europeans
try to cover up their past cruelties in Europe to other Europeans instead of
confronting that fact fully. The Turkish assault against Europe has quite
a different salience.
Historically, it was not Europe that the Turks threatened but Christendom. Europe was not then distinct from Christendom. For diplomats
and men of affairs, writes Denys Hay,
the intrusion of the Turk was a fact which could not be ignored and the practical
acceptance of a Moslem state into the field of diplomacy might well have produced
an early rejection of Christendom in the field of international relations. . . . The
language of diplomacy maintained the established terminology: the common
enemy, the Christian republic, the Christian world, the provinces of Christendom
are found in the phraseology of a large number of sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury treaties. A similar attitude is to be found in the treatises of the international
6

Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,
Daedalus, vol. 121, no. 4 (1992).

Muslims and European Identity

213

lawyers down to, and even beyond, Grotius. If the Turk was not different under
natural law, he was certainly different under divine law: the Turk was not far
short of a natural enemy of Christians.7

In the contemporary European suspicion of Turkey, Christian history, enshrined in the tradition of international law, is being reinvoked in secular
language as the foundation of an ancient identity.
Consider another example: the 1995 interview with Tadeusz
Mazowiecki on the subject of his principled resignation as the U.N. representative of human rights in the Balkans. At one point the interviewers,
Bernard Osser and Patrick Saint-Exupery, pose the following question:
You are Polish and Christian. Is it strange to hear yourself defending
Bosnians, many of whom are Muslims? Some readers might wonder
how it is that two French intellectuals, heirs to the secular Enlightenment, can formulate such a question in Europe today. But of course the
aim of this leading question is to elicit the plea for tolerance that the interviewers know will be forthcoming. So I find it more significant that
Mazowiecki expresses no surprise at the question itself. Instead, he responds as expected by urging tolerance. He assures his interviewers that
the war in Bosnia is not a religious one and that Bosnian Muslims are not
a danger to Europe. It bodes ill for us, he warns, if, at the end of the
twentieth century, Europe is still incapable of coexistence with a Muslim
community.8
Mazowieckis assumption (accepted without comment by his French
interlocutors) is that Bosnian Muslims may be in Europe but are not
of it. Even though they may not have migrated to Europe from Asia
(indeed, they are not racially distinguishable from other whites in Europe),
and even though they may have adjusted to secular political institutions
(insofar as this can be said of Balkan societies),9 they cannot claim a
Europeannessas the inhabitants of Christian Europe can. It is precisely
because Muslims are external to the essence of Europe that coexistence
can be envisaged between us and them.
7
8
9

Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1957), 11314.
B. Osser and P. de Saint-Exupery, The U.N.s Failure: An Interview with Tadeusz
Mazowiecki, The New York Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 14, September 21, 1995.
In its historical practice, writes Francois Thual, Caucasian, Balkan, Greek, and Slav
Orthodox Christianity has never known secularism based on the separation of Church and
State. (Dans le monde orthodox, la religion sacralise la nation, et la nation prot`ege la
religion, Le Monde, January 20, 1998, 13.) It is a little known factand one very rarely
publicizedthat the Greek constitution is proclaimed in the name of the Holy Trinity,
and that it affirms that the dominant religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox
Church of Christ.

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T ALAL A SAD

For both liberals and the extreme right the representation of Europe
takes the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam.
I do not mean by this that both sides are equally hostile toward Muslims
living in Europe.10 Nor do I assume that Muslim immigrants are in no way
responsible for their practical predicament. I mean only that for liberals
no less than for the extreme right, the narrative of Europe points to the
idea of an unchangeable essence.
ISLAM AND THE NARRATIVE OF EUROPE

Europe, we often read, is not merely a continent but a civilization. The

word civilization is no longer as fashionable in the West as it was at
the turn of the nineteenth century, but it appears to be returning. Some,
like Michael Wintle, still object that the term civilization should not be
applied to Europe, while insisting that there is something that Europeans
share:
To talk in terms of a quintessential or single European culture, civilization, or identity leads quickly to unsustainable generalization, and to all manner of heady and
evidently false claims for ones own continent. Nonetheless, if the triumphalism
can be left to one side there is a long history of shared influences and experiences,
a heritage, which has not touched all parts of Europe or all Europeans equally,
and which is therefore hard and perhaps dangerous to define in single sentences
or even paragraphs, but which is felt and experienced in varying ways and degrees
by those whose home is Europe, and which is recognizedwhether approvingly
or disapprovinglyby many from outside.11

The key influences on European experience, Wintle continues, are the

Roman Empire, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and industrialization.
It is because these historical moments have not influenced Muslim
10

11

The hostility of secular liberals, however, is often difficult to distinguish from that of
the extreme right. In France, for example, a headmaster suspended three Muslim schoolgirls in September 1989 for wearing head scarves on the grounds that they were in
contravention of French laws of lacite. Later the headmasters suspension order was
overturned by Frances education minister. The response that followed was remarkable.
A group of leading intellectuals, including Regis Debray and Alain Finkelkraut, compared the ministers decision to the 1938 appeasement of Nazi Germany at Munich:
by implication, observes Hargreaves, the Islamic bridgehead established by the three
girls in Creil now represented a comparable threat to the future well-being of France.
The form in which the issue was publicly represented helped the extreme right-wing Front
National Party to win a sweeping by-election victory near Paris, an event that in turn
contributed to the adjustment of government policy on immigration. See Hargreaves,
Immigration, 1256.
Michael Wintle, Cultural Identity in Europe: Shared Experience, in M. Wintle, ed.,
Culture and Identity in Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 13 (emphasis added).

Muslims and European Identity

215

immigrants experience that they are not those whose home is Europe.
These moments are precisely what others have designated European
civilization.
Raymond Williams notes that the word civilization is used today in
three senses: (1) a single universal development (as in human civilization); (2) the collective character of a people or a period that is different
from and incommensurable with others (as in the civilization of the renaissance in Italy); and (3) the culture of a particular population, which
is rankable as higher or lower than another, and perhaps also capable
of further development.12 Although Williams does not say so, the three
senses together articulate the essence of European civilization: it aspires to a universal (because human) status, it claims to be distinctive
(it defines modernity), and it is (at least in terms of quantifiable criteria)
undoubtedly the most advanced. Taken together these senses require a
narrative definition of Europe.
The two journalistic examples I cited earlier both assume a historical definition of Europe as a civilization. But they do so in ways that
are largely implicit. Hugh Trevor-Ropers The Rise of Christian Europe
is one of many academic texts that expresses the essence of European
identity explicitly by means of a historical narrative.13 Trevor-Ropers
book is interesting because it defines European civilizationand therefore
European identityas a narrative, or at least as the beginning of one
whose proper ending is already familiar. Like other texts with which it
may be compared, it presents a twofold notion of history: the history of
the idea of Europe and of European history.14 It also has an interesting historical location. It appeared in 1965, when British decolonization
was more or less complete and when the flood of non-European immigrants from the former colonies was stemmed by legislation passed
amidst charges of betrayal of its principlesby the Labour government.
At the time a new role for Britain in its postimperial phase was being
vigorously debated in all sections of the political spectrum. The option
of joining Europe politically was an important part of that debate.
12
13

14

Raymond Williams, Key Words (London: Fontana (Collins), 1983).

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 2d ed. (London: Thames and Hudson,
1965). Described by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer as one of the most brilliant
works of historiography to be published in England in this century, it has been reprinted
numerous times, most recently in 1989.
For example, Hay, Europe; J.-B. Duroselle, Lidee dEurope dans lhistoire (Paris:
Denoel, 1963); R.H. Foerster, Europa: Geschichte einer politischen Idee (Munich:
Nymphenburger, 1967); K. Wilson and J. Van der Dussen, eds., The History of the
Idea of Europe (London: Routledge, 1995).

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T ALAL A SAD

When Trevor-Roper speaks of European history, he does not mean

narratives about the inhabitants of the European continent, which is why
there is nothing in his book about Byzantium and Eastern Europe, or
about North-Western Europe (other than brief references to the Vikings
destructiveness), or about Jews (other than as victims), or about Muslim
Spain (other than as an intrusive presence). European history is the
narration of an identity many still derive from European (or Western)
civilizationa narrative that seeks to represent homogeneous space and
linear time.
What is the essence of that civilizational identity? Trevor-Roper reminds his readers that most of its ideas and many of its techniques entered
European civilization from outside. The things that belong to European
civilization, therefore, are those that were taken up and creatively worked
on by Europe. Productive elaboration becomes an essential characteristic
of Europe as a civilization. This view makes sense, I would suggest, in
the context of a particular Enlightenment theory about property first propounded by John Locke. Locke argued that a persons right to property
comes from the mixing of labor with the common things of this world.
God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for
their benefit and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to
draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain
common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and
rational (and labor was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.15 Applied to whole peoples,
property was European to the extent that Europeans appropriated, cultivated, and then lawfully passed it on to generations of Europeans as their
own inheritance.
European history thus becomes a history of continuously productive
actions defining as well as defined by Law. Property is central to that story,
not only in the sense familiar to political economy and jurisprudence, but
in the sense of the particular character, nature, or essence of a person
or thing. It is a story that can be narrated in terms of improvement and
accumulation in which the industrial revolution is merely one central
moment. According to this conception, European civilization is the
sum of properties, all those material and moral acts that define European
identity.
15

John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1924),
book II, chapter V, paragraph 34 (emphasis added).

Muslims and European Identity

217

It follows from this view of Europe that real Europeans acquire their
individual identities from the character of their civilization. Without that
civilizational essence, individuals living within Europe are unstable
and ambiguous. That is why not all inhabitants of the European continent are really or fully European. Russians are clearly marginal.
Until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too, but
since that break the emerging discourse of a Judeo-Christian tradition
has signaled a new integration of their status into Europe.16 Completely
external to European history is medieval Spain. Although Spain is
now defined geographically as part of Europe, Arab Spain from the
seventh to the fourteenth centuries is seen as being outside Europe,
in spite of the numerous intimate connections and exchanges in the
Iberian Peninsula during that period between Muslims, Christians, and
Jews.
There is a problem for any historian constructing a categorical
boundary for European civilization because the populations designated
by the label Islam are, in great measure, the cultural heirs of the Hellenic
worldthe very world in which Europe claims to have its roots.
Islamic civilization must therefore be denied a vital link to the properties that define so much of what is essential to Europe if a civilizational difference is to be postulated between them. There appear to be
two moves by which this is done. First, by denying that it has an essence
of its own, Islam can be represented as a carrier civilization that helped
to bring important elements into Europe from outside, material and
intellectual elements that were only contingently connected to Islam.17
Then, paradoxically, this carrier civilization is attributed an essence: an
ingrained hostility to all non-Muslims. That attribution constitutes Islam
as Europes primary alter. This alleged antagonism to Christians then
becomes crucial to the formation of European identity. In this, as in
other historical narratives of Europe, this oppositional role gives Islam
a quasi-civilizational identity.18 One aspect of the identity of Islamic
civilization is that it represents an early attempt to destroy Europes
civilization from outside; another is that it signifies the corrupting moral
16
17
18

Of course, anti-Semitism has not disappeared in Europe. But no one who aspires to
respectability can now afford to be known publicly as an anti-Semite.
The Arabs themselves . . . had little of their own to offer. . . . But as carriers, their services
to Europe were enormous. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 141.
In Trevor-Ropers picturesque language: Out of this union [of ecclesiastical and feudal
power] would come, in due time, the combined spiritual and material counter-attack of
the enslaved West against its Moslem exploiters: the Crusades. Ibid., 100.

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T ALAL A SAD

environment that Europe must continuously struggle to overcome from

within.19
This construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking
about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization.
The idea that peoples historical experience is inessential to them, that it
can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenments claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract
category humans, can be assimilated or (as some recent theorists have
put it) translated into a global (European) civilization once they have
divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from
their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization
of the Islamic world. And by the same logic it underlies the belief that the
assimilation to Europes civilization of Muslim immigrants, who are for
good or for ill already in European states, is necessary and desirable.
The motive of European history in this representation is the story
of Europes active power to reconstruct the world (within Europe and
beyond) in its own Faustian image.20 Europes colonial past is not merely
an epoch of overseas power that is now decisively over. It is the beginning
of an irreversible global transformation that remains an intrinsic part of
European experience and is part of the reason that Europe has become
what it is today. It is not possible for Europe to be represented without
evoking this history, the way in which its active power has continually
constructed its own exclusive boundaryand transgressed it.
THE SHIFTING BORDERS OF MODERN EUROPE

It is often conceded that several peoples and cultures inhabit the European
continent, but it is also believed that there is a single history that articulates European civilization and therefore European identity. The official
19

20

Hence Trevor-Ropers account of the European Crusaders who established a principality

in Jerusalem from the end of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth: The Christian
kingdom of Jerusalem continued for less than a century. The Christian virtues, such as
they were, evaporated in the East. The Christian dynasties ran out. . . . [T]he sonsor
rather the successors, for there was a dearth of sonssettled down to a life of luxurious
co-existence in which feudal bonds were rotted and oriental tastes indulged. Ibid., 104.
By Christian Trevor-Roper refers, of course, only to those who originated in Europe,
because the Middle East at the time was largely inhabited by indigenous Christians who
were central contributors to Islamic civilization.
On Europes Faustian identity, see Agnes Heller, Europe: An Epilogue? in B. Nelson,
D. Roberts, and W. Veit, eds., The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity (Oxford: Berg, 1992).

Muslims and European Identity

219

European Union slogan expresses this thought as unity in diversity. But

determining the boundaries of that unity continues to be an urgent problem for anyone concerned with the civilizational basis of the E.U. Perry
Anderson has noted some of the difficulties about boundaries encountered
in recent discourse:
Since the late Eighties, publicists and politicians in Hungary, the Czech lands,
Poland and more recently Slovenia and even Croatia have set out to persuade
the world that these countries belong to Central Europe that has a natural affinity to Western Europe, and is fundamentally distinct from Eastern Europe. The
geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is
described by Czeslaw Milosz, for example, as a Central European city. But if
Polandlet alone Lithuaniais really in the center of Europe, what is the east?
Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the
same writersMilan Kundera is another exampledeny that Russia has ever belonged to European civilization at all, we are left with the conundrum of a space
proclaiming itself center and border at the same time.21

Andersons witty account highlights the illogicality of recent definitions

of Europe. Yet it is precisely the politics of civilizational identity that
is at work in the discourse of Europes extent. For Poles, Czechs, and
Hungarians it is a matter not only of participating in the European Common Market, but of distancing themselves from a socialist history. Where
Europes borders are to be drawn is also a matter of representing what
European civilization is. These borders involve more than a confused geography. They reflect a history whose unconfused purpose is to separate
Europe from alien times (communism, Islam) as well as from alien
places (Islam, Russia).
J. G. A. Pocock has spelt out another aspect of this politics of civilization: Europeboth with and without the North America whose addition turns it from Europe into Western Civilizationis once again an
empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide
whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along
its borders but not within its system.22 In Pococks separation between a
civilized culture and violent cultures, we sense that Europes borders
at once protect and threaten its unity, define its authority, and engage
with external powers that have entered its domain. The inside cannot
contain the outside, violent cultures cannot inhabit a civil one, Europe
cannot contain non-Europe. And yet Europe must try to contain, subdue,
or incorporate what lies beyond it and what consequently comes to be
21
22

P. Anderson, The Europe to Come, London Review of Books, January 25, 1996.
J. G. A. Pocock, Deconstructing Europe, London Review of Books, December 19, 1991.

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T ALAL A SAD

within it. European capitalism and European strategic interests cannot be

confined to the European continent.
The representation of Europes borders is, of course, symbolic. But
the signs and symbols have a history. Like the borders of its constituent
states, the European Unions boundaries are inscribed in treaties according
to the conventions of international lawthe cumulative result of earlier
narratives of Europe. The status of individual borders as well as the very
institution of international law that regulates todays worldwide society
of nation-states have been constituted by narratives of Europe. Adam
Watson summarizes the story:
The expansion of Europe was neither uniform nor systematic. It occurred over
several centuries, for a number of reasons, and assumed many different forms.
Chronologically we can distinguish in retrospect four main phases. First came
the medieval crusades into Iberia and round the Baltic. The second phase covered
three centuries of competitive maritime exploration and expansion and the parallel
evolution of a European international society. Thirdly in the nineteenth century
the industrial revolution enabled the European Concert to encompass the entire
globe and to administer most of it. Lastly in our own century the tide of European
dominion ebbed, and was replaced by a world-wide society based on the European
model but in which Europeans now play only a modest role.23

What this story misses is that Europe did not simply expand overseas;
it made itself through that expansion. This story also underestimates the
role that Europeansespecially those who inhabit the United States
still play in regulating world-wide society, a role that is by no means
modest. The borders of political Europe have varied not only over time,
but also according to the European model governing global relations.
Can Muslims be represented in Europe? As members of states that
form part of what Watson and others call European international society,
Muslims have, of course, long been represented (and regulated) in it.
But representing Muslims in European liberal democracies is a different
matter. It raises a question that does not apply to the international system:
how can a European state represent its minorities?
EUROPEAN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND
MINORITY REPRESENTATION

So far I have explored the idea that Islam is excluded from representations of Europe and the narratives through which the representations
23

Adam Watson, European International Society and its Expansion, in H. Bull and
A. Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985), 32.

Muslims and European Identity

221

are constituted. I now approach the question from another angle: are
there possibilities of representing Muslim minorities in modern European
states?
The ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it
difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims. Why? Because
in theory the citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a class
that is defined only by what is common to all its members and its members
only. What is common is the abstract equality of individual citizens to one
another. Marie Swabey has stated the issue succinctly:
The notion of equality central to democracy is clearly a logical and mathematical
conception. . . . [O]nce equality is admitted, the notions of number, per capita enumeration, and determination by the greater number are not far to seek. . . . Citizens
are to be taken as so many equivalent units and issues are to be decided by the
summation of them. . . . Once we conceive the whole (the state) as composed of
parts (the citizens) which are formally distinct but without relevant qualitative
differences, we are applying the notion in its essentials. Involved here is the assumption not only that the whole is authoritative over any of its parts, but that
what there is more of has ipso facto greater weight than that which differs from
it merely by being less. In the democratic state this idea is expressed as the postulate that the opinion of the people as a whole, or of the greater part of them, is
authoritative over that of any lesser group.24

It follows, Swabey goes on, that the opinion of a majority is more

likely to represent approximately the opinion of the whole body than
any other part. In this conception representative government is assimilated to the notion of an outcome that is statistically representative of
the whole body of citizens. The same principle applies to segments of
the whole (the state) according to which representatives of geographically demarcated constituencies represent aggregates of individual voters.
It is no accident that the statistical concept of representativeness emerged
in close connection with the construction of the welfare state (a process
that began toward the end of the nineteenth century) and the centralization of national statistics. Both in the history of statistical thinking and in
the evolution of democratic politics, these developments were especially
importantdemography, social security legislation, market research, and
national election polls.
In principle, therefore, nothing should distinguish Muslims from nonMuslims as citizens of a European democratic state other than their fewer
number. But a minority is not a purely quantitative concept of the kind
stipulated by Swabey, not an outcome of probability theory applied to
24

Marie Collins Swabey, The Theory of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1939), 1820 (emphasis in original).

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T ALAL A SAD

determine the opinion of a corporate bodythe people as a whole.

The concept of minority arises from a specific Christian history: from
the dissolution of the bond that was formed immediately after the Reformation between the established church and the early modern state. This
notion of minority sits uncomfortably with the Enlightenment concept of
the abstract citizen.
The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the states business to secure
religious uniformity within the polityor at least to exclude Dissenters
from important rightswas crucial to the formation of the early-modern
state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the political
community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the absolutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The theory was criticized almost from the moment it was first statednotably by Edmund
Burke for the license it gave to destructive passions and by Karl Marx for
disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive movements that
helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secularTractarianism in England and Ultramontanism
in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing the freedom of
Christs church from the constraints of an earthly power.25 An important
consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the
eventual emergence of minority rights as a central theme of national
politics. Members of minorities became at once equal to all other citizens,
members of the body politic (the people as a whole), and unequal to
the majority in requiring special protection.
The political inclusion of minorities has meant the acceptance of groups
formed by specific (often conflicting) historical narratives, and the embodied memories, feelings, desires that the narratives have helped to shape.
The rights that minorities claim include the right to maintain and perpetuate themselves as groups. Minority rights are not derivable from
general theories of citizenship: minority status is connected to membership in a specific historical group not in the abstract class of citizens. In
that sense minorities are no different from majorities, also a historically
constituted group. The fact that they are usually smaller in number is
an accidental feature. Minorities may be numerically much larger than
25

Joseph Heim, The Demise of the Confessional State and the Rise of the Idea of a Legitimate Minority, in J. W. Chapman and A. Wertheimer, eds., Majorities and Minorities
(New York: New York University Press, 1990).

Muslims and European Identity

223

the body of equal citizens from whom they are excluded. In the British
empire vast numbers of colonial subjects were ruled by a democratic
state of citizens far smaller in number through a variety of constitutional
devices.26 Minorities are defined as minorities in structures of dominant
power.
Take the case of France. Religious Muslims who reside in France are
similar to the Christian (and post-Christian) inhabitants of that country
in this regard: each group has constituted itself as a group through its
own narratives. These narratives, and the practices they authorize, help to
define what is essential to each group. To insist in this context that Muslim
groups must not be defined in terms they regard as essential to themselves
is in effect to demand that they can and should shed the narratives and
practices they take to be necessary to their lives as Muslims. The crucial
difference between the majority and the minorities is, of course, that
the majority effectively claims the French state as its national state. In
other words, to the extent that France embodies the Jacobin narrative,
it essentially represents the Christian and post-Christian citizens who are
constituted by it.
Thus Jean-Marie Le Pens insistence in the early eighties on the right
of the majority (the French in France) to protect its distinctive character
against the influence of minority difference is not only an extension of the
left slogan the right to difference. It is a claim that the majoritys right
to be French in their own country precludes the right of minorities to
equal treatment in this regard. We not only have the right but the duty
to defend our national personality, Le Pen declares, and we too have
our right to be different.27 Given the existence of a French national personality of which the Jacobin republic is claimed to be the embodiment,
and given that the majority is its representative, Le Pen can argue that
only those immigrants able and willing to join them (thereby ceasing to
26

27

Colonies, protectorates, mandates, intervention treaties, and similar forms of dependence make it possible today for a democracy to govern a heterogeneous population
without making them citizens, making them dependent upon a democratic state, and at
the same time held apart from the state. This is the political and constitutional meaning
of the nice formula the colonies are foreign in public law, but domestic in international law. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1926; trans. ed.,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 10.
Nous croyons que la France est notre patrie, que les Francais y ont des devoirs mais
aussi des droits superieurs a` tous autres, et que nous avons non seulement le droit mais le
devoir de defendre notre personnalite nationale et nous aussi notre droit a` la difference.
Le Monde, 21 September 1982, cited in part, and in English translation, by Miriam
Feldblum, Re-Visions of Citizenship: The Politics of Nation and Immigration in France,
19811989, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991, 48. My translation of the original is
slightly different from Feldblums.

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T ALAL A SAD

belong to a minority) have the right to remain in France as French citizens. It follows that the inassimilable ones (North African Muslims)
should be encouraged to leave when their labor is no longer required by
France. This may be an intolerant position but it is not illogical.28 To be
a French citizen is to reflect, as an individual, the collective personality
that was founded in the French Revolution and embodied in the laws
and conventional practices of the French Republic, and that is recounted
in its national story. Although that personality may not be regarded as
eternal and unchangeable, it represents a precondition of French citizenship. As even liberals concede, the individual citizen cannot make with
the state any contract he or she chooses independently of that personality.
In brief, the narratives that define being French and the practices they
authorize cannot be regarded as inessential. French citizens cannot be
de-essentialized. This view, shared by the Left, Center, and Right, rejects
the notion that the citizen is identical only with himself or herself, that
he or she therefore essentially represents an abstract quantity that can be
separated from his or her social identity, added up and then divided into
groups that have only numerical value. It should not be surprising that
Le Pen has been able to push the greater part of the majority toward endorsing reforms of the Nationality Code in the direction demanded by the
extreme right.29 The very existence of the French Jacobin narrative permits the extreme right to occupy the ideological center in contemporary
French immigration politics.
Liberals are generally dismayed at the resurgence of the Right, but the
notion of primordial intolerance will not explain it. Many critics have
observed that part of the problem resides in the identification of national
boundaries with those of the state. Some of them have sought a solution
in the radical claim that all boundaries are indeterminate and ambiguous.
William Connolly has recently theorized the matter more perceptively.
He asks, pointedly, whether it is possible to prize the indispensability of boundaries to social life while resisting overdetermined drives to
overcode a particular set. He goes on to question the assumption that
the boundaries of a state must correspond to those of a nation, both of
28

29

Feldblum, in Re-Visions, argues that the immigration politics of the extreme right are
better described as nativist than as racist, because the latter term does not explain
why many of the nonracist left also share certain crucial elements of the same position.
While Feldblums study as a whole is valuable for understanding developments in recent French ideas of national identity, she does not discuss the contradictions inherent
in liberal ideas of citizenship. Her use of the pejorative term nativism to denote populist denunciation of foreign influences deflects her from an adequate consideration of
liberal forms of exclusivism.
See Hargreaves, Immigration, 16976.

Muslims and European Identity

225

these to a final site of citizen political allegiance, and all three of those to
the parameters of a democratic ethos.30
The problem of representing Islam in European liberal democracies
cannot be addressed adequately unless such questioning is taken seriously.
With America especially in mind, Connolly urges a shift in the prevalent
idea of pluralism from a majority nation presiding over numerous minorities in a democratic state to a democratic state of multiple minorities
contending and collaborating with a general ethos of forbearance and critical responsiveness.31 The decentered pluralism he advocates in place of
liberal doctrines of multiculturalism requires a continuous readiness to deconstruct historical narratives constituting identities and their boundaries
(which, he argues, have a tendency to become sacralized and fundamentalized) in order to open up space through which care is cultivated for
the abundance of life.32
To what extent and how often historical narratives that constitute identities can be deconstructed remains a difficult question. Thus I have been
arguing, on the one hand, that Europes historical narrative of itself needs
to be questioned and, on the other, that the historical narratives produced
by so-called minorities need to be respected. This apparent inconsistency is dictated partly by my concern that time and place should be made
for weaker groups within spaces and times commanded by a dominant
one. Muslims in Europe, I have implied, should be able to find institutional
representation as a minority in a democratic state where there are only
minorities. For where there are only minorities the possibilities of forging
alliances between them will be greater than in a state with a majority
presiding over several competing minorities.
My comments also reflect an unresolved tension: how can respect for
individual identities be ensured and conditions be fostered that nurture
collective ways of life? The latter concern is not merely a matter of
recognitionof the demand that one should be able to name oneself
and be confirmed by others as the bearer of that name, and thereby have
ones anxieties allayed. It is also a matter of embodied memories and
practices that are articulated by traditions, and of political institutions
through which these traditions can be fully represented. (The constituency
represented does not have to be geographically continuous.) Our attention
needs to be directed not so much at how identities are negotiated and
recognized (for example, through exploratory and constructive dialogue,
30
31

W. E. Connolly, Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation-State: Rethinking the Connections, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 1 (1996), 58 (emphasis in original).
32 Ibid., 70 (emphasis in original).
Ibid., 61.

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T ALAL A SAD

as Charles Taylor has advocated).33 Rather, the focus should be on what

it takes to live particular ways of life continuously, cooperatively, and
unself-consciously.
John Milbanks arguments for decentering are different from
Connollys, and they are linked to a specifically medieval historical experience. His contrast between what he calls enlightenment simple space
and gothic complex space has implications for a Europe of nationstates: complex space has a certain natural, ontological priority; simple
space remains by comparison merely an abstracting, idealizing project. . . .
This is the case because there is no such thing as absolute non-interference;
no action can be perfectly self-contained, but always impinges upon other
people, so that spaces will always in some degree complexly overlap, jurisdictions always in some measure be competing, loyalties remain
(perhaps benignly) divided.34 The sovereign state cannot (never could)
contain all the practices, relations, and loyalties of its citizens.
The idea of complex space, in contrast to the discourse of a borderless world, is in my view a fruitful way of thinking about the intersecting
boundaries and heterogeneous activities of individuals as well as of groups
related to traditions. But we need to think also of complex time: of how
embodied practices are rooted in multiple traditions, each drawing on
temporalities that connect present and future, and of how each tradition cultivates a distinctive experience of the present and privileges some
desires over others.
The scope for national politics with its exclusive boundaries is reduced in complex space and timethough not simply in favor of supranational or subnational structures. The question is not simply one of
devolution or of regional integration, the question now being debated
in the European Union, but of how to allow for more complicated patterns of territory, authority, and time. The scope of national politics is
already reduced in part for the well-known reason that the forces of global
capitalism often undermine attempts to manage the national economy
although this is truer of some national economies than of others. It is
reduced also because networks that straddle national boundaries mobilize variable populations for diverse enterprises. This latter needs to be
explicitly accommodated.
33
34

See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
J. Milbank, Against the Resignations of the Age, in F. P. McHugh and S. M. Natale,
eds., Things Old and New: Catholic Social Teaching Revisited (New York: University
Press of America, 1993), 19.

Muslims and European Identity

227

But there is something else: because the temporalities of many traditionrooted practices (that is, the time each embodied practice requires to
complete and to perfect itself, the past into which it reaches and which
it reenacts and thereby extends) cannot be translated into the homogeneous time of national politics, scope for the latter is further reduced.
The bodys memories, feelings, and desires necessarily escape the rational/
instrumental ambitions of such politics. (This is not properly understood
by those well-wishing critics who urge Asian immigrants to abandon their
traditions, to regard some of their collective memories and desires as not
essentially their own, and to embrace instead the more modern conception of self-determination underlying the European nation-state in which
they now live.35 ) For many Muslim minorities (though by no means all),
being Muslim is more than simply belonging to an individual faith whose
private integrity needs to be publicly respected by the force of lawand
more, certainly, than a social identity to be guaranteed by the nation-state.
It is being able to live as part of a collective way of life that exists beside
others in mutual tolerance. The question for them is: what kind of political conditions can be developed in Europe in which everyone lives as a
minority among minorities?
I conclude with another question because decisive answers on this matter
are difficult to secure. If Europe cannot be articulated in terms of complex space and time, which allow for multiple ways of life and not merely
multiple identities to flourish, it may be fated to be no more than the common market of an imperial civilization,36 always anxious about (Muslim)
exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond. In such an embattled modern spacea space of abundant consumer choice and optional
life-stylesis it possible for Muslims to be represented as Muslims?
35

36

See Homi Bhabha, New Statesman and Society, March 3, 1989: where once we could
believe in the comforts and continuities of Tradition, today we must face the responsibilities of cultural Translation. This was written in a spirit of friendly advice to Muslim
immigrants in Britain during the Rushdie affair. Yet how innocent is the assumption
that Muslim Tradition carries no responsibilities, and that cultural Translation to a
British lifestyle in Britain is without any comforts?
Europe is again an empire concerned for the security of its limitesthe new barbarians
being those populations who do not achieve the sophistication without which the global
market has little for them and less need of them. Pocock, Deconstructing Europe.
There is, of course, a periodic need for barbarian labor.

11
The Long Road to Unity: The Contribution
of Law to the Process of European
Integration since 1945
PHILIP RUTTLEY

The formation of Europeand of the European Communities and the

Union that lie at the heart of the continents political lifehas largely
been expressed in legal terms.1 In the space of more than fifty years, the
antagonists of two savage world wars have so far merged their economies
and some of their legal systems that any further conflict between the
major European states is now almost unthinkable. It has instead become
increasingly likely that, within the next few decades, full-scale economic,
monetary, and political union will take place between the fifteen Member
States of the European Union.2
If, however, one had asked any of the leading European figures about
their vision for Europe at various critical periods of the postwar era,
one would have received rather different answers, largely conditioned by
the wider geopolitical scene. It cannot, therefore, be said that there was a
linear path from the rubble of 1945 to the vision of a federal United States
of Europe that is emerging. Almost from the beginning the reassertion of
national independence and sovereignty polarized states with a federalist
vision of a United States or Confederation of Europe and those with an
intergovernmental vision of a concert of states acting together in their
mutual self-interest rather than as part of a wider union. This tension
is far from resolved. Indeed, the price of keeping the European Union
Although all errors and omissions are my own, I gratefully acknowledge the generous support and advice of His Hon. Judge Nicholas Forwood of the EC Court of First Instance and
of my colleagues Dominic Spenser Underhill, Kate Learoyd, and Christian Charlesworth
who read the original manuscript.
1 I have attempted to describe the state of EU law as of December 1, 1998.
2 For historical surveys see Charles Zorgbibe, Histoire de la Construction Europeenne
(Paris: PUF, 1993); Marie-Ther`ese Bitsch, Histoire de la Construction Europeenne de 1945
a` nos Jours (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1996); and Elizabeth du Reau, LIdee dEurope
au XXe Si`ecle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1996).

228

The Long Road to Unity

229

together has been the institutionalization of these divisions into the very
architecture of the two Treaties on European Union of Maastricht (1992)
and Amsterdam (1997).
FROM THE TREATY OF PARIS TO THE TREATY
OF AMSTERDAM: THE UNIFICATION OF EUROPE
THROUGH THE EC TREATIES

The treaties on European Union have produced an inchoate mixture of

shared competence between the Union and the Member States, the enshrinement of the concept of subsidiarity, and the increased use of
opt-out clauses permitting an a` la carte approach to common European
policies. Nevertheless, the ideal of an ever closer union of the peoples
of Europe has served as the fundamental inspiration for much of the
development of the European Communities.3 Sometimes overtly federalist sentiments were expressed, as in the immediate postwar period in
response to outside military and political threats (for example, the Soviet
threat during the Cold War). At other times such sentiments appear to
have been kept judiciously in the background (as during the antifederalist
ascendancy of the Thatcher administration in the United Kingdom in the
mid-1980s). More recently, outspokenly federalist sentiments have come
to the fore again. In 1998 German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder openly
advocated a fully fledged United Europe, and his foreign minister, Joschka
Fischer, described the creation of a single European state as the decisive
task of our time.4
In the immediate aftermath of the German surrender of May 1945,
there was an upsurge of enthusiasm for a unified Europe to replace, once
and for all, the destructive nationalist ideologies that for so long had torn
3

Article 2, EC Treaty. The nomenclature of the various European Community treaties is

liable to confuse the uninitiated. The original three Communities were each created by a
separate treaty: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was established by the
1951 Treaty of Paris; the European Economic Community (EEC) was established by the
1957 Treaty of Rome; and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) was
established by the Second Treaty of Rome of 1957. The 1965 Merger Treaty unified all
the Community Institutions common to the three Communities to create a single Council,
Commission, and Parliament. EC Treaty refers to the EEC Treaty as expanded by later
treaties such as the Maastricht Treaty on European Union of 1992. The Maastricht Treaty
created the European Union, a political union separate from the European Communities
(which create economic integration through the implementation of common policies).
Thus it is more accurate to speak of EC law when discussing the rules in the EC Treaty or
tax harmonization or the removal of customs barriers. EU law refers to the legal obligations
created by the Maastricht Treaty, such as the mechanisms for arriving at common positions
on foreign policy or judicial cooperation.
The Times, November 27, 1998.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

the old continent apart. Before the Stalinist takeover of much of Eastern
Europe in 1948, many advocated a grand vision of a United States of
Europe. Most vocal among them was Winston Churchill, who used his

unrivaled moral authority to make such a proposal in Zurich

on September 19, 1946.5 The start of the Cold War, and the consciousness of their
distinct national identities on the part of France and the United Kingdom, quickly replaced this enthusiasm for pan-European unification with
a more hard-headed sense of national interest. Nevertheless, the very real
threat of invasion or war by Soviet Russia (in 1948 during the Berlin
airlift, in 1952 during the riots in East Berlin, in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising, and in 1968 during the Czechoslovak crisis), as well as the
economic rivalry of the United States and Japan, led to a realization that
some form of unity for the democratic countries of Europe was necessary.
Paradoxically perhaps, the Socialist-led United Kingdom of 1945,
as the main victorious Western European power, held aloof from the
moves toward European integration. While Churchill used his immense
prestige to advocate a federalist union of Europe, the United Kingdom
considered that its long-term interests lay with its Empire and the British
Commonwealth. This proved to be a colossal geopolitical mistake. The
British Empire was quickly swept away by a tide of nationalism in the
Third World, leaving Britain isolated on the sidelines of European integration for two decades until the United Kingdom finally joined the
European Economic Community in 1973.
By contrast, France correctly perceived that its long-term strategic interests lay primarily in the European continent. France led the process of
integration with the political field largely free of serious competition, since
Germany and Italy could hardly take a lead in the immediate postwar period, while Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands could not match
French economic and military power. This period of French hegemony
over the process of European integration during its formative stages had
a fundamental consequence for the future shape of European institutions:
during the crucial formative stages, the European Community was ideologically led by France, with its very individual tradition of government
and conception of civil administration. Not surprisingly, the resulting institutional structure of the three European Communities described in footnote 3 is essentially French in character. To Anglo-Saxon eyes, the executive power of the European Commission and the judicial activism of the
European Court of Justice are incompatible with traditions of separation of powers and noninterventionist judiciaries. The internal modus
5

See du Reau, LIdee dEurope, 166.

The Long Road to Unity

231

operandi of the Commission, and the types of legislative acts that the
Community Institutions can adopt, are again strongly French in character. The Commission is divided in Directorates-General with their
officials organized in divisions along the model of the French civil service. The motor language of the Community was and remains French,
with official documents first drafted in that language and then translated
in the other official languages. The European Court of Justice is essentially French in its character and procedure. An impersonal court, it produces anonymous judgments with no dissenting minority opinion being
recorded. The Court is even assisted in its deliberation by a legal expert,
the Advocate General, whose nearest equivalent is the Commissaire au
Gouvernment of the French administrative law system.
As noted earlier, the fundamental political and legal structure of the
European Communities is French in character, with subtle and far-reaching
consequences for the vision of Europe that has conditioned the imagination of political leaders. This character has led to tension when the
European Communities have expanded to include new Member States of
different legal and administrative traditions. Such tension was particularly acute in the United Kingdom and in Denmark. Their adoption of
communautaire ways has been particularly troubled, but a RomanoGallic, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, legal tradition has largely prevailed,
giving the European Union a subtly different character than it would have
had if the United Kingdom had participated in the initial formative stages
of the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty or the Messina Conference of 1995 (which led to the creation of the EEC and EURATOM).
The centripetal forces of ever-increasing cooperation led to the desire
for more centralization and more fusion of the powers of the EC states.
The Single European Act of 1987 strengthened integration in certain areas to create an Internal Market (as opposed to the looser Common
Market). Federalist sentiments then resurfaced quickly. These unifying
ambitions led to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, vigorously opposed by
the United Kingdom and Denmark. Their governments were adamantly
against the idea of a federal union.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s has led to a wholly
novel geopolitical situation. The competing ideological blocks of capitalism and communism have now been replaced by a world where the
United States is the unrivaled single superpower with three strong regional
rivalsthe European Union, China, and Russia. The discredited Marxist
ideology has been replaced, virtually worldwide, by an acceptance of liberal capitalism. This has led to two far-reaching consequences, both of
which profoundly affected the future shape of the European Union: the

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

creation in 1994 of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the collapse
of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and the former Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR). Faced with these two developments the European Community felt increased pressures toward some form of federal or even confederal union. This was most clearly manifested during the intergovernmental conference that led to the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 with its
thinly disguised federalist ideology. As has been acutely observed, the
European Community signifies very different things to different people
and constitutes a political forum in which competing and even conflicting
aims and goals are mediated and negotiated.6
The historical process of European integration through the successive
EC Treaties conveniently divides into five distinct phases. The first phase,
from 1945 to 1955, saw the creation of the prototype for all the later
European Communitiesthe European Coal and Steel Community established by the Treaty of Paris of 1951 for a period of 50 years. The
first phase also saw the abortive negotiations concerning the European
Defense Community and the European Political Community. The second
phase, from 1955 to 1968, saw the creation of the EURATOM and the
EEC, both by the Treaties of Rome in 1957. The third phase, from 1965
to 1987, was a period of dynamic integration and severe institutional
and political clashes between the Member States and the supranational
centralized Community Institutions, which began to flex their political
and legislative muscles. The European Communities expanded from six
Member States to twelve. The fourth phase, from 1987 to 1992, saw
the next leap forward toward greater economic and political integration,
through the vast legislative program of harmonizing legislation of the
1987 Single European Act. The fifth phase, from 1992 to the present day,
saw Europe at the crossroads. After the Treaties of Maastricht (1992) and
Amsterdam (1997), the 15 European states now stand on the threshold
of federal union. This is creating the strains and tensions that currently
bedevil European politics. Each of these five phases will be discussed in
detail.
The First Phase, 19451955
To a significant measure, the success of European unificationa far
more accurate term than the word integrationis the work of the
European Court of Justice and the far-sighted federalist politicians
6

Paul Craig and Grainne

de Burca, EU Law: Text, Cases and Materials, 2d ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).

The Long Road to Unity

233

Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak, Jacques Delorswho

have led Europe through its critical stages.
The experience of administrating the Marshall Plan gained through the
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), created in
1948, was a useful prototype of intergovernmental coordination.7 Other
factors increasing the habit of cooperation between European states
were the 1948 Treaty of Brussels between the United Kingdom, Belgium,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of 1949; and the Western European Union Treaty of 1954.
These were largely political alliances, but attempts also were made at genuine economic interstate cooperation. In 1944, while the Second World
War was drawing to a close, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg
agreed to create a far-reaching economic integration program under the
Benelux Treaty, including a customs union between the three signatories. As we have seen, however, the postwar Labor administration in
Britain systematically rejected closer union with Europe. Various reasons
of principle lay behind this: a desire not to turn Britains back on the
Commonwealth that had supported it through two world wars; the belief that what remained of the British Empire would allow it to stand
aside from its continental partners; a fundamental concern that national
sovereignty should be preserved and not transferred to supranational institutions beyond the control of the British electorate.8
In 1948 a congress for Europe was gathered at the Hague to negotiate an acceptable form of continent-wide cooperation. Because of
British objections, the result was the creation of a rather truncated organism, called the Council of Europe, which provided for a Committee of
Ministers (meeting every six months) and a Parliamentary Assembly (with
limited powers to make recommendations to the Council of Ministers).
The Councils main activities since its creation in 1949 have been in the
spheres of cultural, scientific, and economic cooperation but most prominently of all in the European Convention on Human Rights of 1953. This
Convention created a Commission and a Court dealing with human rights
guaranteed by the Convention (among them the right of fair trial and the
7
8

The OEEC developed into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), whose membership expanded to include the United States, Canada, and Japan.
Britain was not alone in holding such sentiments. At the Havana conference in 1948,
the United States effectively vetoed the creation of the proposed International Trade
Organization on the grounds that its powers would undermine the national sovereignty
of the United States; it would take until 1994 for a similar institution, the World Trade
Organization, to be created. (Nationalistic sentiments are still being expressed about the
WTO on Capitol Hill.)

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

right of free expression and of holding private property without undue

interference from the state).9 Its original signatories included the states
currently in the European Community, plus Switzerland and Turkey.
Since Britain refused to agree to further European unification, other
European states decided to embark on an interstate integration without
the United Kingdom. Behind these moves toward unity was the theory that
the root cause of war in Europe was the economic rivalry of Germany and
France. The federalist French politician Jean Monnet proposed the bold
plan of merging the coal and steel production of France and Germany,
particularly in the heavily industrialized border areas of the Ruhr and
the Saar rivers, which have been fought over since the 1870s. Robert
Schuman, the French foreign minister, strongly supported this plan. He
proposed a wholly novel European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC
was not a mere intergovernmental forum. It entailed the creation of a supranational High Authority with wide regulatory powers, a Council with
legislative powers, a political representative Assembly; and a supervisory
European Court of Justice. This was a giant step toward European unification: for the first time the European states had created a supranational
entity whose independent sui juris and sui generis institutions had the
power to bind the ECSCs constituent states.10
The ECSC Treaty of Paris was signed in 1951 by France, Germany,
Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The clear intention of
the ECSC was to act as a prototype for wider European integration; the
treaty was not merely about fusing coal and steel production.11
Not all attempts at unification could be thwarted by sensitivities over
national sovereignty when the United Kingdom saw its vital interests
threatened. France could be equally intransigent. The heightening tensions of the Cold War raised the difficult question of the rearmament of
Germany. The United States advocated that this process should be conducted within NATO. France proposed instead a European Defense
9

10

11

For surveys see P. Van Dijk and G. J. H. Van Hoof, Theory and Practice of the European
Convention on Human Rights, 2d ed. (Deventer: Kluwer, 1990) and Louis-Edmond
Pettiti, Emmanuel Decaux, and Pierre-Henri Imbert, La Convention Europeenne des
Droits de lHomme (Paris: Economica, 1995).
It is an interesting anecdotal fact that the foreign ministers of France, Italy, and Germany
at the time of the ECSC negotiations all spoke German as their first language. (The
French foreign affairs minister was originally from Alsace-Lorraine and the Italian from
the Alto-Adige.) This factor apparently greatly assisted them in building mutual trust and
understanding.
See F. Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Europe (New York: Norton, 1994),
239 (with quotes from Monnets comments from 1952).

The Long Road to Unity

235

Community (EDC) with a European army, joint institutions, and a common budget. This proposal in 1950 led to the signing of the EDC Treaty
by the six ECSC states in 1952.
The following year a draft statute for a European Political Community
was proposed as a complement to the EDC. It set out a detailed federal
program, including joint institutions and a coordinated foreign policy.
However, a combination of nationalist and Communist deputies in the
French National Assembly defeated the proposals in 1954, and both the
EDC and EPC were abandoned.
The Second Phase, 19551968
Although the process of European unification had suffered significant setbacks through the opposition of Britain and France at various moments,
the idea of a European union strengthened markedly in the second phase.
A conference of the six ECSC foreign ministers was held in Messina,
Italy, in 1955; Britain declined to take part. Under the chairmanship of
the Belgian prime minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, a wide-ranging proposal for
a European Economic Community and a European Atomic Energy Community was produced. The rationale of the EEC was to create a trading
bloc, with a customs union and the removal of barriers to internal trade
(such as the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital). This
Common Market would harmonize the national economic, fiscal, and
social policies of the six participating states.
Accordingly, the six ECSC states, under the Treaty of Rome of 1957,
established a far-reaching and radical European Economic Community.
The EEC Treaty covered most forms of economic activity (except the
defense industry), harmonized taxation, removed internal customs barriers, and established common rules for economic activity (for example,
competition, free movement, and rights of establishment).
To implement common policies designated to create this Common
Market, the EEC established an institutional structure based on the ECSC
model. Thus, legislative authority was vested in a Council (where Member
States are represented); executive power was conferred on a Commission;
a political representative assembly was established (the European
Parliament); and constitutional control over the legality of the acts of
EEC institutions was given to the European Court of Justice.
These four institutions are supranational institutions with powers derived from the constitutive Treaty of Rome of 1957. A long line of cases

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

from the European Court of Justice has established the doctrine of the
supremacy of community law over conflicting national law.12 To the extent that legal competence to act in a particular way has been transferred
to the Community by the Member States, the EEC states no longer have
the right to act unilaterally or independently.13
The EEC, like its precursor, the ECSC, has international legal
personality.14 Therefore, the EEC can enter into diplomatic and treaty
relations in much the same manner as a conventional sovereign state.15
The rationale for the EURATOM was, of course, different from that for
the ECSC and the EEC. In essence, the six states recognized their inability
(individually) to match the investment and technological strength of the
United States or of the USSR in the field of nuclear energy. Consequently,
their best option was to fuse their individual strengths in a common enterprise, the EURATOM. The EURATOM Treaty reproduced the same
institutional pattern as its sister Communities: a Council, Commission,
Assembly, and Court of Justice.
In 1965 a Merger Treaty was concluded between the six states in order to merge the institutions created by the ECSC, the EEC, and the
EURATOM into a common Council Commission, Parliament, and
Court.16 Henceforth, therefore, the Commission became a single Commission with powers under all three constitutive EC Treaties in the spheres
covered by their provisions.
The European Economic Community Treaty, in its original form, was
a wide-ranging economic and political cooperation treaty. Its aim was to
increase the prosperity of the citizens of the EEC states:
The Community shall have as its task, by establishing a common market and
an economic and monetary union and by implementing the common policies or
activities referred to in Articles 3 and 3a, to promote throughout the Community
a harmonious and balanced development of economic activities, sustainable and
non-inflationary growth respecting the environment, a high degree of convergence
12

13
14
15

16

See Case 26/62, Van Gend en Loos v. Netherlands Tax Administration (1963), European
Court Reports; Case 6/64, Costa v. Enel (1964), ECR 585; Case 106/77, National Finance
Administration v. Simmenthal (1978), ECR 629; and Case C-213/89 R v. Secretary of
State for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd and Others (1990), ECR I-2433. For a
general survey, see T. C. Hartley, The Foundations of European Community Law, 4th ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), chap. 7.
Case 22/70, Commission v. Council (1971) ECR.
Article 210, EC Treaty; Article 6, ECSC Treaty; and Article 184, EURATOM Treaty.
See Ian Brownlee, Principles of Public International Law, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), chap. 30; and I. Macleod, I. D. Hendry, and Stephen Hyett, The External
Relations of the European Communities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chap. 2.
The Merger Treaty of 1965 was repealed and then repeated without any substantive
changes by Article 9 of the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam.

The Long Road to Unity

237

of economic performance, a high level of employment and of social protection,

the raising of the standard of living and quality of life, and economic and social
cohesion and solidarity among Member States.17

To achieve this, the EEC Treaty authorizes the pursuit of several common policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common
Transport Policy, the Common Customs Union, and the Common Commercial Policy (for external trade). To achieve these objectives, the Community Institutions, such as the Commission, are conferred legislative
powers and executive authority in the form of Regulations, Directives,
and Decisions. Regulations are directly applicable laws that automatically
become part of the national domestic laws of the Member States and operate in much the same way as an act of Parliament in the United Kingdom
or an act of Congress. Directives define objectives for the Member States.
They must be achieved by a certain date. Each Member State can use
its discretion concerning the legislative means to achieve the objective.
Finally, Decisions are addressed to individual Member States.18
To facilitate the achievement of the Common Market, the fathers of
the EEC Treaty were conscious of the need to break down the many
overt and hidden barriers to unity such as customs duties, differing professional or technical standards, residence permits, and administrative
registration requirements. The EEC Treaty therefore created four fundamental freedoms: the freedom for citizens to move between states (Articles
4851); the freedom to establish oneself in another state (Articles 5258);
the freedom to provide services in another state but ones own (Articles
5966); and the free movement of capital (Articles 6273). Later treaties,
described in subsequent parts of this chapter, considerably expanded the
scope of the Treaty of Rome.19
The Third Phase, 19651987
Dynamic growth and dramatic internal clashes characterized the third
decade of European Unification. These difficulties came out of Frances
nationalist ambitions under General Charles de Gaulle; the enlargement
of the Community in 1973 and 1980 to absorb the United Kingdom,
Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, thus fundamentally
17
18

19

Article 2, EC Treaty.
See Article 249 (formerly Article 189), EC Treaty; and Article 161, EURATOM Treaty.
The ECSC Treaty enumerates two types of binding acts: binding decisions and
recommendations, which operate like EEC directives (see Article 14, ECSC Treaty).
Examples include the Single European Act 1987, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, and the
Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

altering the political and social composition of the Union; and the political
and institutional lethargy of the 1980s, when the European Communities
seemed to have run out of steam.
The conflicts between Gaullist France and its five EEC partners erupted
in a full-scale crisis in 1965 when the transitional provisions of the original
EEC Treaty expired. This led to the move from unanimous voting in the
Council to qualified majority voting. The Commission at that moment
made a fiscal proposal to the Council of Ministers that the Community
should raise its own funds from direct taxation on agriculture and external
trade tariffs, rather than relying on funds contributed by Member States.
Attacking the federalist logic of the Commissions proposals, de
Gaulle attempted to persuade his partners in the Council of Members
but without success. As a result, France boycotted Council meetings by
means of an empty-chair policy for a full seven months from June 1965
to January 1966, until a compromise was eventually reached. This compromise, known as the Luxembourg Accords, effectively gave France
the victory it was seeking. Where the vital interest of a Member State
(or those interests it considered to be vital) were at stake, voting in
the Council would be by unanimity (thus giving individual states a veto
power). Ordinary matters were to be decided on the basis of qualified majority voting. The Luxembourg Accords significantly shifted power back
to the Member States and away from the centralized institutions of the
Community, particularly the Commission.
While the Community was facing difficulties internally, it began to acquire an increasingly strong personality externally, and gradually began
to express itself with a single voice. Thus, it negotiated as a block of contracting nations during the 1967 Round of GATT (General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade) negotiations and, in 1963, successfully concluded a farreaching trade and development aid agreement with 18 African states at
Yaounde. This agreement would subsequently become the prototype of a
whole service of aid and trade agreements between the European Community and its former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, known as the
Lome Conventions (after the capital of Togo where they were signed).20
However, not all Western European states agreed with the EC six
that an integrationist model was appropriate. Seven statesthe United
Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and
Portugalcreated the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which
20

The Lome I, II, III, and IV agreements are examples. See Macleod, Hendry, and Hyett,
External Relations, 380ff.

The Long Road to Unity

239

sought to provide a large measure of reciprocal trade liberalization but fell

short of creating supranational institutions with legislative powers, such
as the European Community. Broadly, the EFTA Treaty of 1960 provided
for the elimination of customs barriers and of quantitative restrictions
for industrial products. Various reasons inspired adherence to the EFTA:
traditional neutrality in the case of Sweden and Switzerland or resistance
to the dilution of national sovereignty in the case of the United Kingdom.
The seven EFTA countries were geographically and commercially very diverse, and one has the impression of a faute de mieux economic treaty.
Later Iceland and Finland joined the EFTA, lending it at least a greater
Scandinavian coherence.
Thus, by the early 1960s the Western European nations were grouped
into two trading blocks: the original six EC states making the Common Market and the seven EFTA states. The only states of any size that
remained isolated for one reason or another were Greece, Spain, and
Turkey.
By 1961 the United Kingdom began to reconsider its global strategy
that relied on ties with the Commonwealth and the Empire. The sweeping
independence movement in the developing world led to the final disintegration of nearly all of what remained of the British Empire. While maintaining close ties with its former colonies, such as India, Britain recognized
that the most promising focus for its exports was the massive common
trading area emerging on its very borders. Britain accordingly applied for
EEC membership in 1961 only to be vetoed by de Gaulle, and then once
again on Britains second application in 1967. After de Gaulle fell from
power following the events of May 1968, the road became clear for an
expanded membership of the EEC, with Britain, Ireland, Norway, and
Denmark applying for membership. Certain other European states (such
as Greece, Portugal, and Spain) could not be considered for EEC membership since their military regimes precluded adherence to the fundamental
norms of EEC membership.
The tensions that constantly underlie membership in the European
Unionnational sovereignty and independence versus fused sovereignty
and the increase of collective poweremerged strongly at this time.
Norways electorate rejected membership in a referendum in 1973. The
United Kingdom had to undergo a national referendum in 1975 to confirm
the electorates approval of its EC membership.
When the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark became Member
States on January 1, 1973, the six became the nine. After the fall of its
military regime, Greece became the tenth Member State in 1980. Portugal

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

and Spain followed in 1986 once they, too, had become parliamentary
democracies.
Intergovernmental cooperation deepened during the 1970s. The 1970
Davignon Report (commissioned after the 1969 Hague Summit) proposed quarterly meetings of the foreign affairs ministers of the six Member
States; this was later institutionalized in the European Political Cooperation scheme of 1973, giving the EEC states a mechanism for achieving
a common voice in those international organizations where all Member States were members (for example, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development). Then in 1974 the European Council
was established to give a regular forum for holding summits. The drawback to this form of summitry was, of course, that it weakened the
unification process in favor of continued individual comportment by
Member States. Parliamentary supervision was also weakened. Intergovernmentalism now dominated at the expense of more integrative
forces.
This negative trend was largely the result of the Luxembourg Accords,
by which the French won the right from Member States to block or retard
new policies. Under the original EEC Treaty scheme, the Commission
was to have the role of formulating policy and of proposing new laws to
the Council. As Piet Dankert, a leading Commissioner of the time, has
observed:
The Council of Ministers, which was originally intended to be a community body,
has now become largely an intergovernmental institution thanks to the famous
Luxembourg Agreement, which under French pressure, put an end to the majority
decisions which the Council was supposed to take according to the [EEC] Treaty
on proposals submitted by the European Commission. This [new voting rule as a
result of the Luxembourg Accord] that decisions could only be taken unanimously
had the effect of gradually transforming the Commission into a kind of secretariat
for the Council which carefully checked its proposals with national officials before
deciding whether or not to submit them. This in turn has a negative effect on the
European Parliament which can only reach for power, under the Treaty, via the
Commission.21
There were, however, forces working in the other directions; the system of the
Communitys own resources (a strong federalist element) and the related extension
of the European Parliaments budgetary powers and in 1979, the direct election
of that Parliament.22
21

22

This was written before the co-decision procedure between the Council and the Parliament and the Parliamentary consultation procedures introduced in the legislative architecture of the European Community by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992.
Piet Dankert, The ECPast, Present and Future, in The ECPast, Present and Future,
ed. L. Tsoukalis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 7.

The Long Road to Unity

241

The result of heightened intergovernmentalism was political stagnation.

States freely exercised their Luxembourg Accord right to veto new
initiatives.
With no clear political direction for the European Communities in the
mid-1970s and early 1980s, various proposals were made to strengthen
integration. Most noteworthy were the Tindermans Report of 1974, the
Report of the Three Wise Men, the European Parliaments draft Treaty
on European Vision, and the Genscher-Colombo Plan of 1983. None
of these was ever acted uponclear evidence of the unresolved tensions
between national sovereignty and closer European integration.
The Tindermans Report (produced by Belgian Prime Minister Leo
Tindermans) was commissioned by the 1974 Paris Summit to make proposals for the Communitys future. The Tindermans Report was radical.
It proposed moving away from intergovernmentalism by strengthening
the Commission and the European Parliament, the latter to be elected by
universal suffrage. The report also proposed reforming the Council and
suggested further measures toward monetary integration and citizenship
rights. In addition, it advocated developing social and regional policy.
The so-called Committee of Three Wise Men was established after
the 1978 Brussels summit. Its mandate was to consider means of achieving
greater political integration. Like the Tindermans Report, the Committee favored strengthening the role of the Commission and lessening the
effects of intergovernmentalism. The Committee recommended qualified
majority voting in the Council (providing that certain measures could
be adopted by the Council only if they achieved a certain percentage of
votes).23
The Genscher-Colombo Plan, the brainchild of the German and Italian
foreign ministers at the time, advocated institutional reform, budgetary
reform, and an expansion of the areas where the Community had exclusive
competence to act at the expense of the Member States. Although no
action was taken, the Council did consider the Genscher-Colombo Plan,
and it issued a Declaration on European Union in 1983.24
Pressure built to find a way out of the political stagnation that was
beginning to bring into question the raison detre of the European Community. In 1979 direct elections to the European Parliament were held.
Although the turnout, which averaged 62 percent, was low, the election
of a representative assembly (albeit with limited powers) in all nine EEC
Member States was a symbolic step forward.
23

See Bulletin EC-11-1978: 1.5.2.

24

See Bulletin EC-6-1983: 1.6.1.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

The European Parliament is the most federalist of the Community

Institutions. This is perhaps not surprising since the rationale for its
powers and activities is, by definition, supranational and contrary to
the continued role of the national assemblies of the Member States. In
1984, on the basis of a report compiled by the leading Italian federalist
member of the European Parliament (MEP), Alberto Spinelli, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a Draft Treaty on European
Union. This document proposed radical reform: a stronger Community,
a Council that shared its legislative and budgetary powers with the European Parliament, and greater use of qualified majority voting on Council
decisions.
No action was taken on the basis of the draft treaty, but the Fontainebleau Council Summit of 1984 knew that action was needed if the
European Community was to emerge from stagnation. The result was
the formation of two committees: the Adonnino Committee to examine
the question of furthering European identity and a peoples Europe
and the Dooge Committee on political reform. This led to the landmark
meeting in 1985 of the ten Member States in Milan. A majority voted to
convene an intergovernmental conference to discuss an amendment to the
original Treaty of Rome.25
The Fourth Phase: The Single European Act of 1987
Given the opposition of certain Member States (in particular the United
Kingdom) to any further transfer of political sovereignty to the Community, the integrationists chose the subtle maneuver of concentrating on
the more economic aspects of integration. Their aim was to increase the
drive toward economic, monetary, and fiscal integration that a core
Internal Market would bring, rather than propose controversial schemes
for greater political cooperation. Lord Cockfield, then a Commissioner,
produced a white paper in 1985 proposing to remove a whole series
of internal trade barriers by December 31, 1992.26 This would create an
Internal Market described by the (amended) EEC Treaty as follows:
The internal market shall comprise an area without internal frontiers in which the
free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured.27
25
26
27

The objections of Greece, Denmark, and the United Kingdom were overridden by their
fellow members of the European Community.
COM (85) 310. (COM is the standard way of referring to EC Commission documents.)
Article 18, EC Treaty (formerly Article 8A).

The Long Road to Unity

243

It is no accident that the White Paper proposed not to achieve the

Internal Market through Regulations (which are, as I noted earlier, primary and legally binding forms of EC legislation). Instead, the Internal
Market was to be created by means of over 200 Directives, the form of legal act that allowed the greatest legislative freedom to Member States. The
chief architect for the revival of European integration was Jacques Delors,
the former President of the Commission. He skillfully exploited divisions between the Member States to achieve his objectives. The United
Kingdom and Denmark were the two most reluctant integrationists among
EC states. It is in no small measure due to Delors that momentum toward unification regained speed after 1987 and led to the Treaty on
European Union of Maastricht (1992) and the Treaty of Amsterdam
of 1997.
The Single European Act of 1987 (SEA) introduced sweeping institutional changes. The mechanism for achieving joint international positions was given treaty status by the creation of the European Political Cooperation.28 The decision-making process of the Community was
changed with the introduction of a cooperation procedure whereby the
Parliament was to be consulted prior to the adoption of new legislation
by the European Community. The Parliament was also given a power of
veto on both the accession of new Member States and the conclusion of
association agreements with states outside the community. In addition,
qualified majority voting was introduced in the Council in many areas
previously reserved for unanimous voting.
Exclusive Community competencethat is to say, reserving for exclusive action by the Community and prohibiting the right of Member
States to act individuallywas extended to many areas hitherto reserved
for the national governments: cooperation in economic and monetary
union, social policy, economic and social cohesion, research and technological development, and environmental policy.
In effect, the SEA changed EC politics. It broke the hegemony exercised
by the Council (that is, the Member States), and the purely European
institutions, which could afford to go beyond narrow national interests,
began to set the agenda. By concentrating on economic and fiscal integration, and by avoiding an ambitious political program, it succeeded
in being all things to all Europeans: the antifederalists considered it a
sound (if rather technocratic) set of proposals that had the virtue of
leaving sovereignty relatively intact; the federalists, perhaps sensing that
28

Title III of the SEA, which does not form part of the EC Treaty.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

institutional and political reforms would inevitably emerge from the

achievement of the internal market, bided their time. The Single European
Act thus succeeded in performing the remarkable political feat of reconciling two opposing strands of European ideology at a critical stage of the
Communitys history. One commentator has perceptively written:
Unlike all earlier attempts and proposals to revive the Community, the 1992
White Paper, although innovative in its conception of achieving a Europe without
frontiers, was entirely functional. Critically, it eschewed any grandiose institutional schemes. These were to come as an inevitable result once the programme
of internal market Directives to be achieved by 31 December 1992 was in place.
Because of this technocratic approach, the White Paper apparently appealed to
those with different and often opposing ideological conceptions of the future of
Europe. To some it represented the realisation of the old dream of a true common
market-place which, because of this inevitable connection between the social and
the economic in modern political economies, would ultimately yield the much
vaunted ever closer union of the peoples of Europe [envisaged by Article 2
of the EC Treaty]. To others, it offered a vision of the European dream finally
lashed down to the marketplace, and importantly, a market unencumbered by the
excessive regulation that had built up in the individual Member States.29

A fundamental area of European unification is financial, fiscal, and monetary policy. It lies at the very heart of functional national sovereignty.
Therefore, the proposals for greater Community centralization in these
areas predictably generated the loudest debate.
With relative ease the original six Member States agreed on the principle of eventual monetary union.30 This was achieved as far back as
1969. They also agreed that the Community should be funded from its
own sources of tax revenue rather than from financial contributions by the
Member States.31 The Budgetary Treaty and the Own-Resources Decision
of 1970 had an important federalist element: they made the Community
financially independent from its parent Member States. Contributing
to the federalist current was the new role given to the Parliament: to
it was transferred the Councils powers of adopting the Community budget. The Parliament lost little time in flexing its political muscles by using this effective right of veto over the Community budget.32 To oversee
29
30

31

32

J. Weiler, The Transformation of Europe, Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 24578.
See the report of the committee headed by Werner (Luxembourgs prime minister) in
Bulletin EC-11-1979. See also the Council Resolution of 1971 on the achievement of
monetary union in successive stages (EC Official Journal 1971, C28/1).
Its own sources were agricultural levies, customs duties levied at the Communitys external borders on products of non-EC origin, and 1 percent of the Value Added Tax (VAT)
levied by the EC Member States.
See Hartley, The Foundations of European Community Law, chap. 1.

The Long Road to Unity

245

Community revenue and expenditure, a Court of Auditors was set up

and required to report at the end of each financial year.33 Progress toward
more substantial monetary integration had to wait a decade: ten years
later the nine Member States established a European Monetary System,
with a mechanism for mutually defending the value of national currencies, the Exchange Rate Mechanism.34 More symbolically, the Member States also agreed on a joint unit of monetary account, the European Currency Unit (ECU), calculated daily based on a basket of EC
currencies.
The Fifth Phase: The Maastricht Treaty on European Union
of 1992 and the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997
The 1987 SEA proved to be a catalyst for greater integration. The
European Council decided that political and economic integration should
be pursued by holding an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) to discuss
further steps on European Monetary Union and political integration. The
IGC negotiations led to the drafting of a new treaty in 1991. This became the landmark Treaty on European Union signed at Maastricht in
February 1992. After much public debate, a narrow majority accepted the
treaty in France, the United Kingdom, Denmark (where it required two
national referenda), and Germany (where a constitutional challenge was
defeated in the Federal Supreme Court). The Maastricht Treaty finally
came into force in November 1993.
The European Community had grown to twelve Member States by
1992, and by 1995 (when the Amsterdam Treaty negotiations started),
to fifteen Member States. This Community of states was utterly different from the original core (six countries) that had created the ECSC,
EEC, and EURATOM Treaties. The Union now included countries, not
only with a wide variety of cultures (Scandinavians, North Europeans,
Mediterraneans), but with an equally wide range of economic strengths
(Portugal compared with Sweden, Greece compared with Germany). But
fundamental political differences still divided the fifteen Member States
as to what form European Union should take: federalist, confederalist,
or intergovernmental.
33

34

See David OKeefe, The Court of Auditors, in Institutional Dynamics of European

Integration, ed. D. Curtin and T. Henkels (Deventer: Kluwer, 1994); and I. Harden,
F. While, and K. Donnelly, The Court of Auditors and Financial Control and Accountability in the European Community, European Public Law 1 (1995): 599.
Bulletin EC-121978, a Council Resolution strengthened by an Agreement between the
national central banks of the Member States.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

It is perhaps not surprising that the Maastricht Treaty provided for

another intergovernmental conference four years hence to examine
to what extent the policies and forms of co-operation introduced by
this Treaty may need to be revised.35 This second IGC led to the Treaty
of Amsterdam of 1997, which has not really solved these fundamental
differences.
The Treaty of Amsterdam amended the Maastricht Treaty on European
Union by adding a principle of open government.36 Decisions within the
EU are to be taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible
by the citizens of the Union. The Treaty of Amsterdam also expanded
the objectives of the Union to include the promotion of a high level
of employment and the creation of an area of freedom, security and
justice.37 In addition, the Treaty declares that the Union is founded
on respect for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Respect
for human rights, particularly those enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are made central to the Union. New
applicant states must commit themselves to respect these rights.38 The
Treaty makes observance of the ECHR legally actionable against defaulting states or Community Institutions.39 If the Council finds a state
to be in a serious and persistent breach of these obligations,40 the
Council may suspend the infringing states voting rights (without affecting its obligations).41 An earlier proposal allowed for the expulsion of a defaulting state, but this was rejected as too radical.
Political realism has demanded that the signatories to the Maastricht
and Amsterdam Treaties accept fundamental political differences and
adopt a variegated approach. The Member States are being allowed to
opt out of certain common policies, and certain programs are being implemented only by those states that have the means or the level of development to do so. This is the price being paid for keeping the Union
together. It does, however, lead to incoherence and to a slowing (although
not an outright denial) of the process of unification. It also throws into
question the notion that the principle of an ever closer union among
the peoples of Europe means an integrative process flowing in only one
35
36
37
38
39
41

Article N.2 and B, Maastricht Treaty.

Article 1 (formerly Article A of the Maastricht Treaty).
Article 2 (formerly Article B of the Maastricht Treaty).
Article 49, Treaty of European Union of Maastricht of 1992 (TEU).
40 Under Article 6 of the TEU.
Articles 6 and 46 of the TEU.
See also the new Article 309 of the revised EC Treaty, which empowers the Council,
where action has been taken under Article 6 of the TEU, to suspend other Treaty rights
of a defaulting state, voting rights being suspended automatically.

The Long Road to Unity

247

(federalist) direction.42 Some have seen this as potentially damaging to

the raison detre of the EC. As one critic has written,
It must be said, at the heart of all this chaos and fragmentation, the unique
sui generis nature of the European Community, its true world-historical significance, is being destroyed. The whole future and credibility of the Communities,
as a cohesive legal unit which confers rights on individuals and which enters
into their national legal systems as an integral part of those systems, [are] at
stake.43

The Treaty of Amsterdam is remarkable for self-consciously emphasizing the civil rights foundations of the Union.44 This is partly in response
to persistent (and in the main justified) criticism of the secrecy and bureaucratic style of government practiced by EC institutions. However, it is
also significant at the deeper and more complex level of self-identity. The
Treaty of Amsterdam makes it unambiguously clear that the European
Union is to be based on a political structure that is democratic and participatory.
The history of European integration since 1945 has been dominated,
as we have seen, by two currents: a strong vision of European federalism relying on supranational institutions, and a determination to preserve national identity and sovereignty expressing itself in a preference
for intergovernmentalism. These conflicting tensions were not buried at
Maastricht. Instead, they were enshrined and institutionalized, creating a
rather confusing mixture of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism.
To help create the European Union, the Maastricht Treaty envisaged
three pillars. The first was the European Community itselfthat is to
say, the obligations, rights, and common activities contained in the EC
Treaties. The second and third Pillars fell outside the scope of the EC
Treaties altogether: interstate cooperation on a common foreign and
security policy (CFSP); and justice and home affairs (JHA).45
Through the implementation of a common foreign and security policy including the eventual forming of a common defence policy, the
European Union hoped to achieve an international identity. The European
Council was to define common positions and the Member States were
to ensure that their individual foreign policies conformed to them. The
42
43
44
45

Article 2, EC Treaty.
Dierdre Curtin, The Constitutional Structure of the Union: A Europe of Bits and Pieces,
Common Market Law Review 17 (1993): 67.
Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty of European Union, the treaties establishing
the European Communities and certain related acts (1997).
Article J.1 and J.11; Article K.1 to K.9

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

European Council then established guidelines on which the Council of

Ministers could decide on joint action.
The Parliament was to be consulted by the EU presidency on the
main aspects and the basic choice of the CFSP, with Parliament having
the right to question the Council, to make recommendations, and to hold
an annual debate on the CFSPs and the JHAs progress. In addition, the
Commission was to be fully acquainted with CFSP and JHA activities.
The Justice and Home Affairs Pillar was established to develop close
cooperation between Member States on these eponymous issues. It focused on policy issues such as the legal status of non-EC nationals and
immigration and asylum rights. In addition, it stressed law enforcement.
Cooperation was developed on international crime. Also there was to be
judicial, customs, and police cooperation, including a police information
sharing system, the European Police Office (EUROPOL).
The JHA Pillar of the Maastricht Treaty was formally incorporated into
the main body of the EC Treaty in the Amsterdam Treaty. Finally, a new
title to the EC Treaty was added, covering the free movement of persons
(including visas, asylum, immigration, and judicial cooperation in civil
matters).46 Significantly, and in keeping with the a` la carte approach that
emerged in the 1990s, the United Kingdom and Ireland have adopted
opt-out possibilities as regards the JHA title.
To remedy some of the institutional criticisms of the Maastricht JHA,
the Treaty of Amsterdam created a Pillar of the Community on Police
and Judicial Cooperation.47 In essence, critics of the JHA had pointed out
that many of its areas of forms (immigration, asylum, or border controls)
affected fundamental rights and overlapped with other common policies,
such as the free movement of persons.48 It was desirable to allow the
European Court of Justice judicial control and the input of the Parliament
in the formulation of new legislation in this sphere.
The Treaty of Amsterdam has created a new phase of cooperation on
issues such as freedom, security, and justice through the development of
common actions in the fields of police cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal matters, and the prevention of, and fight against, racism
and xenophobia. It targets terrorism, drug trafficking, arms smuggling,
trade in persons, offences against children, corruption, and fraud. These
problems are to be combated through closer cooperation between the
customs, police, and other authorities of the Member States (assisted
46
47
48

Articles 6169, EC Treaty (formerly Article 73(i) 73(q) EC).

Pillar 3, Title VI.
Under Article 48 et seq., EC Treaty (now Articles 39 et seq.).

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249

by EUROPOL). There is to be closer cooperation between judicial authorities and other relevant authorities of the Member States, and certain
criminal laws in Member States are to be approximated. Practically, such
cooperative action is to take the form of detection, information sharing,
and training, as promoted by the Council through EUROPOL. Judicial
cooperation will make its contribution by facilitating proceedings and
the enforcement of decisions, by assisting extradition and addressing the
issues of compatibility of rules and conflicts of jurisdiction, and by establishing minimum rules on substantive criminal laws and penalties in
selected fields.
On the initiative either of the Commission or of the Member States,
the Council can adopt common positions (defining community policy) or framework decisions on harmonization (although these have
no direct effect), decisions on matters other than harmonization, and
conventions (to be adopted by Member States under their domestic constitutional provisions).49 A limited amount of judicial review is envisaged.50
The European Court of Justice, however, cannot review the legality or
proportionality of operations carried out by the police or other law enforcement services of a Member State or the exercise of the responsibilities
incumbent upon Member States with regard to the maintenance of law
and order and the safeguarding of internal security.
The changes brought about by the Treaty of Amsterdam are, therefore,
limited when compared to Maastricht. However, new common policies
have been added that will eventually have an impact on the citizens of
Europe.
The Community now has express legislative powers to act against
discrimination on grounds of sex, race, ethnic origin, religion, belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation.51 New legislative powers address employment crises.52 These are not primary legal instruments but rather
common measures and initiatives designed to support or complement
national employment policies. (Article 127 of the Treaty of Amsterdam
expressly records the importance of respecting the material competence of
Member States in this sphere.) The Treaty of Amsterdam does, however,
provide for a new Employment Committee, and the Council now has the
power (drawn from conclusions of the European Council) to make Recommendations to Member States after it has examined their policies in the
49
50
51

Article 34, Treaty of Amsterdam.

Basically, it is envisaged when the Member State in question has accepted ECJ jurisdiction
in the matter. See Article 35, Treaty of Amsterdam.
52 Articles 12530, EC Treaty.
Article 13, EC Treaty.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

light of guidelines.53 The Council also can adopt incentive measures to

support the policies of Member States and to encourage cooperation between them. Finally, the Treaty of Amsterdam gives the Council the power
to enact standard-setting measures in the area of public health policy.
However, it also stresses the need to fully respect the responsibility of
the Member States for the organisation and delivery of health services
and medical care.
Conclusion
The process of European integration, as witnessed by the successive EC
Treaties from 1951 to 1997, has not followed a linear path. To some
extent, the twists and turns reflect geopolitical reality. During the Cold
War, the natural response to the Soviet threat was a drive toward the creation of tightly knit economic union. Later, as pressure from the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics receded and European nations withdrew from
their colonial empires, the European Community acted as a centrifugal
force bringing Western European nations together in an expanded union.
Differing traditions of government and perceptions of national identity
then led to tensions between federalists and nationalists.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European states began to
reassert their national identities more strongly. The result is reflected in the
Maastricht Treaty through an inchoate mixture of integration and respect
for national sovereignty and an a` la carte menu of opt-out clauses that
somehow seeks to keep the existing Union together while at the same
time broadly moving toward the eventual integration of all the peoples of
Europe as envisioned by the original Founding Fathers in the early 1950s.
What is undeniable, and should not be underestimated, is the strength
of the European ideal. A wide spectrum of political forcessocialist,
democratic, liberalcan support this ideal. Yet it is the consciousness that
Europeans have a common heritage and a common culture, that there exists a European way, that inspires the various intergovernmental conferences where the fifteen Member States (and ten applicant states) meet.
THE DYNAMIC ROLE OF THE COMMUNITY INSTITUTIONS

The European Communitys legal system has produced one of the most
adventuroussome would say interventionistcourts of any regional
53

Under Article 249, EC Treaty (formerly Article 189 EC), the Council can adopt
mandatory Regulations, Directives, and Decisions as well as persuasive but not
binding Recommendations and Opinions.

The Long Road to Unity

251

system. Indeed, the European Court of Justice has behaved very much
like the U.S. Supreme Court; it has set its individual stamp on the shape
of the emerging European Union. Repeatedly, it has nudged forward the
process of European unification by landmark judgments. In doing so, the
ECJ has been guided by a certain vision of European unification and,
to the extent that ECJ judges have expressed themselves publicly, with a
strong federalist flavor.
As a constitutional court, the European Court of Justice has a wide
and varied jurisdiction.54 It adjudicates on disputes between Community
Institutions (for example, when the Parliament complains that the Council
has not consulted it properly or under the codecision procedure); between
the citizens of the Union and the Community Institutions and Member
States over their implementation of EC law; and between Member States
and Community Institutions (for example, when Member States challenge
the vires of a provision of Community legislation).
Three examples will suffice to describe the ECJs role in nudging forward Community integration with its own collegiate vision of Europe.
The first example will be an analysis of how the Court has enhanced the
Parliaments role in the legislative process. The second example will be
taken from the ECJs role in the development of the doctrine of exclusive Community competence by which sovereignty is transferred from
the Member States to the centralized Community Institutions. The third
and final example will be the ECJs development of the doctrine of direct effect, whereby citizens have a right to enforce Treaty articles and
other forms of Community law against defaulting or recalcitrant Member
States to force them to give their citizens the individual rights intended to
be conferred by the provision of EC law in question.
Before the Treaties of Maastricht (1992) and Amsterdam (1997), the
Parliament was an unhappy hybrid of representative assembly and consultative body. It had little active involvement in EC lawmaking, and this
was thought to be a crucial gap in its nature. However, the Parliament
astutely made use of certain ambiguities in the text of the EC Treaty to
enlarge its role. Accordingly, the Parliament, as a distinct Community Institution, began to use its legal powers to challenge the legal validity of
the acts of other Community Institutions, such as the Council. In doing
so, it forced the ECJ to intervene in the constitutional architecture of the
European Communities.
54

The discussion here will be limited to the European Court of Justice sensu stricto. No
substantive analysis will be made of the EC Court of First Instance, created in 1989,
with jurisdiction largely limited to review European Community acts in the spheres of
competition, external trade, and staff disputes.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

First, the Parliament began legal actions in the European Court of

Justice to force meaningful consultations on the formulation of
EC legislation. Consultation was provided for in the EC Treaty, but its
precise boundaries were not defined (for example, the consequence of
lack of proper consultation of the Parliament on the lawfulness of laws
adopted by the Council). The opportunity came when certain isoglucose
manufacturers sought to challenge a measure made under the Common
Agricultural Policy. They contended the measure was constitutionally invalid for lack of proper consultation of the Parliament on the part of the
Council.55 Although the Council had consulted the Parliament, internal
disagreement within the relevant Parliamentary Committee resulted in a
failure to deliver a Parliamentary opinion on time. Therefore, the Council
went ahead and adopted the contested Regulation.
The Parliament sought the leave of the European Court of Justice to
intervene in the proceedings as an interested third party, against the firm
opposition of some Member States (who, being so-called privileged applicants, have an automatic right to take part in an ECJ proceeding). Under Article 173(1) of the EC Treaty,56 the Council and the Commission
were expressly identified as Community Institutions with an automatic
right to take part in any ECJ proceeding. The question was whether the
European Parliament was implicitly part of that privileged list, as a fellow
Community Institution to the Council or Commission. An answer in the
affirmative would dramatically enhance the power of the Parliament in
ways clearly not intended by the negotiators of the original EC Treaty.
The ECJ firmly and decisively ruled in favor of the Parliaments right to
intervene:
The first paragraph of [Article 173]57 provides that all the institutions of the
Community have the right to intervene. It is not possible to restrict the exercise
of that right by one of them without adversely affecting its institutional position
as intended by the Treaty and in particular Article 4(1).58
The consultation provided for in the third subparagraph of Article 173,59 as in
other similar provisions of the Treaty, is the means which allows the Parliament
to play an actual part in the legislative process of the Community. Such power
represents an essential factor in the institutional balance intended by the Treaty.
55

56
58

In the dispute over Parliamentary consultation in isoglucose legislation, the Council went
ahead and legislated without waiting for the Parliament to deliver its opinion: see Case
138/79, Roquette Fr`eres v. Council (1980), ECR 3333; and Case 139/79, Maizena v.
Council (1980), ECR 3393.
57 Now Article 230, EC Treaty.
Now Article 230, EC Treaty.
59 Now Article 230, EC Treaty.
Formerly Article 7, EC Treaty.

The Long Road to Unity

253

Although limited, it reflects at Community level that fundamental democratic

principle that the peoples should take part in the exercise of power through the
intermediary of a representative assembly. Due consultation of the Parliament in
the cases provided for by the Treaty therefore constitutes an essential formality,
disregard of which means that the measure concerned is void.60

Since this landmark case in 1980, the Court has developed the Parliaments institutional standing by allowing it to join the category of Community Institutions expressly cited in the Treaty as institutions whose
actions can be annulled by legal challenge.61 Thus, Green Party activists
could challenge the Parliaments acts that have a bearing on EC environmental policy.62 More recently, the ECJ appears to have fought shy of
further expansion of the Parliaments legislative role, perhaps in the belief
that the Parliaments powers had increased enough and that expansion of
the Parliaments functions should be left to those who would draft future
EC treaties. In 1990 the ECJ ruled that the Parliaments right to bring an
action to annul a Community measure operates only when its prerogatives (that is, its right to be consulted) have been infringed in the adoption
of the contested measures.63 The ECJ expressly recognized the existence
of a gap in the Treaties but would not arrogate to itself the right to amend
the Treaties by judicial activism:
The absence in the Treaties of any provisions giving the Parliament the right to
bring an action for annulment may institute a procedural gap, but it cannot prevail
over the fundamental interest in the maintenance of and observance of the institutional balance laid down in the Treaties establishing the European Communities.64

The Doctrine of Exclusive Community Competence

In the Communitys structure the relationship between the Member States
and the EC Institutions is problematic. The Member States and the Institutions have their powers. Whereas those of the Member States are derived
from the sovereignty of the constituent nations, those of the Community
60

61
62
63
64

Case 138/79, Roquette Fr`eres v. Council (1980), ECR 3333 at paragraphs 19 and 37;
Case 139/79, Maizena v. Council (1980), ECR 3393. The ECJ has since ruled that, in
certain circumstances, a failure by the Parliament to produce an opinion does not block
the Councils right to legislate. See Case C-65/93, European Parliament v. Council (1995),
ECR I-643.
Under Article 230 of the EC Treaty (formerly Article 173 EC), the acts of the Council
and the Commission are expressly subject to annulment.
Case 294/83, Parti Ecologiste Les Verts v. European Parliament (1986), ECR 1339.
Case 302/87, European Parliament v. Council (1988), ECR 5616 (the so-called comitology case). See also Case C-70/88, European Parliament v. Council (1990), ECR I-2041.
Ibid., paragraph 26.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

have been conferred by the Treaties. The problem is particularly acute in

the sphere of external trade policy. Articles 131135 of the EC Treaty65
have established a common commercial policy to create a single trading
face to the outside world. Although the EC has international legal personality, and thus possesses the powers to act on the international stage
consistent with the need to make these powers function effectively under
public international law, in practice the exercise of these powers would
clash with the desire of Member States to continue acting on the international stage as independent sovereign nations in the traditional way.66
Thus, when it comes to an agreement between, say, rubber-producing nations and rubber-importing nations to regulate trade in this commodity,
who should negotiate: the Member States, the Community, or both?
In the 1970s and 1980s, when Community integration was at its highest because of the intergovermentalism that prevailed, the Commission
started a series of constitutional test cases to obtain a definition of the
boundaries of Community treaty-making competence from the ECJ. Again
the ECJ intervened decisively and controversially in favor of a federalist
direction.
The first test case concerned an agreement between several Member
States and Switzerland, a non-EC state, on road transport. The Commission challenged the vires of the European Road Transport Agreement
(ERTA) on the grounds that such unilateral action on the part of the
Member States concerned was contrary to the exclusive competence of
the Community: in other words, the Community rather than the Member
States should have negotiated the agreement with Switzerland. Although
the ECJ upheld the validity of the ERTA, it gave the Commission an important victory of principle by declaring that the Council and the Commission
should have agreed on an appropriate method of cooperation to ensure
the optimum defense of Community interests.
The Commission went on to pursue this theme in test cases against the
Council.67 The Council then established the doctrine of exclusive community competence: whenever the Council adopts a common position,
either expressly or by implication, in the sphere of foreign policy, it enjoys exclusive community competence in the matter, preventing unilateral
action by Member States.
65
66

67

Formerly Articles 110116 EC.

On the European Communitys international legal community, see Article 210, EC Treaty.
See also the UN Reparations for Injuries Case, 1948, International Court of Justice,
Report 186.
See Hartley, The Foundations of European Community Law, chap. 6; and Macleod,
Hendry, and Hyett, The External Relations of the European Communities, 56 et seq.

The Long Road to Unity

255

The doctrine is a logical one, preventing carefully negotiated common

positions from being undermined by the subsequent actions of individual
Member States. But the ECJ went even further and subsequently ruled
that the Community enjoyed internal competence as well.68 This meant
that the Member States automatically lost their right of individual action
externally. Most radically of all, the ECJ ruled that the loss of power could
occur whether or not the Community had acted internally in the field in
question.69 In this way the ECJ went beyond its earlier doctrine that
Member States retained a sort of transitional competence in the period
before the Community acted in common.70
By the end of the 1970s, the ECJ had radically expanded the power
of the European Community in external relations, allowing it to express
a more coherent voice in the international sphere. Since then, however,
the Member States have successfully fought a rearguard action, and the
ECJ has developed the doctrine of mixed competence, whereby agreements dealing with issues covered partially by the [Treaties] were to be
concluded by both the Community and the Member States in their respective spheres of competence.71 An example is the World Trade Organization agreements that emerged from the Uruguay Round in 1994,
including a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.72 This compromise solutionshared competence between the Member States and
the Communityneatly symbolized the state of European integration in
the mid-1990s.
The Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 attempted to formalize this
position.73 The Commission now plays the main negotiating role in external relations; the Council concludes an external agreement subject to
the Commissions recommendation and after consulting the Parliament.
The Member States, of course, retain their competence when there is no
exclusive Community competence.

68
69
70
71
72

73

The European Community would enjoy internal competence if the Treaty created a common policy in, say, the field of environmental safeguards.
Opinion 1/76, regarding the Draft Agreement for a Laying Up Fund for Inland Waterway
Vessels (1977), ECR 741.
Cases 3,4 and 6/76, Cornelius Kramer and others (1976), ECR 1279.
See David OKeefe and Henry G. Schermers, Mixed Agreements (Deventer: Kluwer,
1983).
See Opinion 1/94 regarding the WTO agreement (1994), ECR I-5267. For the effect of
the WTO within the domestic legal system of the EC, see Philip Ruttley The Direct
Effect of the WTO Agreements in EC Law, in Philip Ruttley, Iain Mac Vay, and Carol
George, eds., The WTO and International Trade Regulation (London: Cameron, May
1998), 130.
Article 300(1), EC Treaty.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY
Private Enforcement of the Treaties against Member States

The ECJ showed its independence and willingness to promote European

integration when it developed the doctrine of direct effect in the 1960s.
At that stage the original six Member States had arrived at the end of the
first transitional period, and certain laws had to be harmonized on a
community level. Most lawyers and constitutional theorists at that time
would have considered the ECSC, EEC, and EURATOM Treaties to be
conventional international agreements between states. Their effects on
the citizens of the participating states would be determined by the domestic law of the Member State in question. Either the Treaties would be
automatically incorporated into the domestic laws of the Member States,
or national assemblies would pass specific laws to establish the extent to
which the foreign Treaties penetrated into the domestic legal sphere
as in the monist constitutional approach of the Netherlands and the
United Kingdom. Greece took the constitutional approach: it automatically incorporates international treaties to which Greece is a party into
national law, giving them superior validity to national law in certain cases
of conflict. The United Kingdom, a dualist state, passed special legislation
to permit its Courts to give effect to certain parts of the EC Treaties
domestically.74 Traditionally, therefore, citizens of states could invoke international treaties to which their state is a party to the extent permitted
by their national law.
The ECJ radically changed this as regards EC law. The test case was
brought as early as 1963 by a Dutch transport firm named Van Gend en
Loos. It imported German goods on which the Dutch customs authorities
sought to levy import duties, notwithstanding the fact that Article 12
of the EEC Treaty expressly forbade the introduction of new interstate
taxes of this sort. Against the opposition of Germany, the Netherlands,
and Belgium, and against dire warnings that the floodgates of vexatious
litigation would be opened if the citizens of EC states were able to invoke
and enforce the EEC Treaty against defaulting states, the ECJ created a
new doctrine, the direct effect of EC law.
The ECJ ruled against the traditionalist view and held that notwithstanding the EC Treatys silence on whether private rights were granted,
the Dutch importer could successfully prevent his tax authority from acting in contradiction to the Treaty. The Court held that the EEC Treaty
was for the benefit of the citizens of the EEC states, who could enforce it
74

The European Communities Act of 1972, as amended. See Lawrence Collins, European
Community Law in the United Kingdom, 4th ed. (London: Butterworths, 1990).

The Long Road to Unity

257

against defaulting or recalcitrant EC states if the provision in question was

absolute and did not require Member States to perform some implementing act, or to exercise discretion as to how to incorporate the provision
into their domestic legal system. Article 12 of the EEC Treaty was clearly
such a provision, since it imposed a general prohibition on new customs
duties as between Member States. There being no room for ambiguity
or administrative discretion, the Dutch transport firm could successfully
resist the Dutch customs levy.75 What is striking is the sweeping, even
visionary, language of the ECJ in its judgment:
To ascertain whether the provisions of an international treaty extend so far in their
effects it is necessary to consider the spirit, the general scheme and the wording
of those provisions.
The objective of the EC Treaty, which is to establish a Common Market, the
functioning of which is of direct concern to interested parties in the Community, implies that this Treaty is more than an agreement which merely creates
mutual obligations between the contracting states. This view is confirmed by
the preamble to the Treaty which refers not only to governments but to peoples. It is also confirmed more specifically by the establishment of institutions endowed with sovereign rights, the exercise of which affects Member States and also
their citizens. Furthermore, . . . the nationals of the states brought together in the
Community are called upon to co-operate in the functioning of this Community
through the intermediary of the European Parliament and the Economic and Social
Committee.
The . . . Community constitutes a new legal order of international law for the
benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited
fields, and the subject of which comprise not only Member States but also their
nationals. Independently of the legislation of Member States, Community law
therefore not only imposes obligations on individuals but is also intended to confer
upon them rights which become part of their legal heritage. These rights arise
not only where they are expressly granted by the Treaty, but also by reason of
obligations which the Treaty imposes in a clearly defined way upon individuals as
well as upon the Member States and upon the institutions of the Community.76

A leading ECJ judge was quite candid later about the activism of the
Court:
It appears from these considerations that in the opinion of the Court, the Treaty
has created a Community not only of States but also of peoples and persons and
that therefore not only Member States but also individuals must be visualised
as being subjects of Community law. This is the consequence of a democratic
ideal, meaning that in the Community, as well as in a modern constitutional
75
76

Case 26/92, Van Gend en Loos v. Netherlands Tax Administration (1963), ECR 1.
Ibid.

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P HILIP R UTTLEY

State, Governments may not say any more what they are used to doing in international law: LEtat, cest moi. Far from it; the Community calls for participation of everybody, with the result that private individuals are not only liable to
burdens and obligations, but that they have also prerogatives and rights which
must be legally protected. It was thus a highly political idea, drawn from a perception of the constitutional system of the Community, which is at the basis of
Van Gend en Loos and which continues to inspire the whole doctrine flowing
from it.77

In many ways the doctrine of direct effect is an application of the principle of the supremacy of Community law over conflicting national law.
Since Van Gend en Loos, the doctrine of direct effect has been progressively extended to allow citizens to force states to honor their EC Treaty
obligations in many areas and to deny states the possibility of frustrating
the operation of EC law by their inaction or failure to fully implement
their Community obligations. The doctrine of direct effect now applies
to EC Treaty Articles and to secondary laws, such as Regulations and
Directives, with various conditions that need not concern us here. Since
Van Gend en Loos, the ECJ has expanded the boundaries of direct effect as well as the doctrine of state financial liability. EC states are now
liable to pay compensation to individuals within their jurisdiction who
have suffered economic damage as a result of their manifest and serious
failure to implement their Treaty obligations.78
Not every Treaty provision or legal measure taken by the EC, however,
can have such direct effect. The provision or measure in question must be
legally perfect: that is to say, it must be unambiguous and clearly intended to benefit a definable class of individuals, it must not require any
further implementation by the Member State, and it must be unconditional. The relevant EEC Treaty provision in the Van Gend en Loos case,
Article 12, of the EC Treaty, states that Member States of the European
Community cannot introduce new tariff barriers between each other. This
is a clear and unambiguous EC Treaty provision, which is unconditional,
77
78

Pierre Pescatore, The Doctrine of Direct Effect: An Infant Disease of Community Law,
in 8 European Community Law Review 155 (1983): 158.
See Cases C-46 and 48/93, Brasserie du Pecheur SA v. Germany and R v. Secretary of State
for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd and others (1996), ECR I-1029; Case C-392/93,
R v. HM Treasury ex parte British Telecommunications plc (1996), ECR I-1631; and Case
C-5/94, R v. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Ford, ex parte Headley Lomas (1996),
ECR I-2553. Case C-48/93 R v. Secretary of State for Transport ex parte Factortame Ltd
and others (III) (1996) ECR I-1029. Proceedings to recover damages from the United
Kingdom by Spanish fishing interests claiming to have suffered economic loss from the
implementation of the Merchant Shipping (Registration) Act of 1988 held the applicants
were not entitled to claim exemplary damages from the respondent in relation to the
breaches that were the subject of the proceedings.

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259

and does not require any enactment of subsidiary laws to give it

effect.79
A direct effect provision of an EC Treaty can be enforced vertically by an individual against several types of public bodies: a government ministry, public bodies that are fulfilling a public function (such as
state education or trade authorities), private companies with a public service function (such as transport operators that fulfill a public function by
servicing the needs of remote areas), or former state-owned companies
that have been privatized but operate under a public monopoly.
The doctrine of direct effect forces Member States to observe their
obligations under the EC Treaties. Individuals who are harmed by another
Member States failure to comply with EC Treaties do not have to trust
their governments to take up the fight for them.80 Nor are they forced to
rely on the European Commission to use its power of enforcement against
defaulting Member States or other forms of enforcement at the sovereign
or international level.81
In the twenty-first century European integration has reached a critical
phase. Now that monetary and economic union is firmly on the agenda a
truly fundamental transfer of sovereignty is taking place: anything before
that was mere politics.
Nearly fifty years after the first European Community was created in
1951, one can discern a unique and distinct European political and legal
framework. It will, in turn, create a new European identity. In retrospect,
EC law and the European Court of Justice were fundamental in shaping
the new political consensus.
79

80
81

For discussion of direct effect, see Hartley, Foundations of European Community Law,
chap. 7; Collins, European Community Law in the United Kingdom, chap. 2; and Henry
G. Schermers and Denis F. Waelbroeck, Judicial Protection in the European Community,
5th ed. (Deveneter: Kluwer, 1992), 13854.
Article 227 of the EC Treaty (formerly Article 170) allows a Member State to start proceedings against another member for failure to comply with EC law.
See Articles 211 and 226, EC Treaty (formerly Article 155 and 169 EC respectively).

12
The Euro, Economic Federalism, and
the Question of National Sovereignty
ELIE COHEN

For years the construction of Europe has been discussed and made by
experts. Because the wider public never quite knew what was going on or
what the issues at stake quite were, Europeat least in most European
nationsenjoyed a generally positive, if also somewhat vague, reputation.
Criticism became apparent only when referenda on the various stages
of the development of European unification transformed it into a public
affair. It was as if a long-agreed discourse on the need for a unified Europe
had effectively camouflaged the consideration of all opposing interests, as
if the only acceptable Europe was one that would be realized by those who
alone were competent to handle such matters, and behind closed doors.
Central to all potential objections to European integration has been and
remains the question of sovereignty. And it is sovereignty that has been at
the core of the debate on monetary union, since the issues at stake involve
such time-hallowed functions of national states as the right to mint money,
the independence of central banks and their possible subordination to
an exterior central power, the loss of parliamentary prerogatives, and
even the loss of a fundamental element of national identity: the national
currency itself.
The first difficulty that arises from any attempt to understand the relationship between monetary union and sovereignty stems from the multiple
meanings that are accorded to the latter. For the term no longer implies
simply the complete and absolute authority of the sovereign body. Political sovereignty, which possesses a clear legal foundation, is often confused
with policy prerogatives, particularly where they concern economic regulation that may vary over time and that can be exercised directly or
by delegation, depending on specific cases. In order to achieve a better
understanding of monetary sovereignty, one must separate what most analysts have attempted to keep together. Can one, for instance, integrate
260

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261

economies and maintain national currencies? Can one set common disciplines and leave the governing of the central banks to the discretion of national political authorities? Should monetary policy be removed from the
control of national parliaments? Does it make economic sense to separate
the monetary and budgetary policies of individual states? The institutional
complexities are multiple, and they sometimes have unexpected effects.
There exist dependent central banks that follow a strict objective of inflation control, and independent central banks (such as the American Fed)
whose anti-inflationist performance was for long only mediocre. Likewise, a central bank does not lack democratic legitimacy simply because
it is independent. The legitimacy conferred on such a bank by constitutional provision, a monetary government made up of representatives of
the federated states, and widespread acceptance by the citizens may grant
it a certain weight and credibility, even if the question of accountability
remains open, as is the case of the European Central Bank.
The question we must ask is a simple one: how did the European
Monetary Union (EMU) become the response to contradicting needs
technical, economic, politicaland in what way does the institutional
model invented for this occasion prefigure the final integration of the
current nation-states into an integrated Europe? In view of the complexity
of the relationship between the technical, economic, and political dimensions of this debate, I shall begin by suggesting an answer to this question
and then outline why I believe it to be the correct one.
WHY THE EMU?

First of all, the EMU is a vital necessity for the construction of a large
European market. It is, in fact, simply impossible to sustain a single market
without a single currency. A system of fixed but adjustable parities can
always skid out of control, as the experience in the summer of 1993 made
abundantly clear. This point of view, however, has been hotly debated
by economists. Some admit that a policy of stimulation of competition
and the unification of the European interior market can be ruined by
erratic currency fluctuations. Others have countered this argument by
maintaining that, even over a long period of time, the parities correct the
differentials of competitiveness and that over a short period the changes
in monetary rates may correct the volatility of the exchange rates.
These arguments, although technically acceptable, fail to recognize
the political dimension of economic integration. When countries do nearly
two-thirds of their exchanges among themselves, and when almost one

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in three jobs in the manufacturing sector depends on foreign trade, any

deregulation that translates into unemployment and bankruptcy questions
the ability of Brussels to manage the integrated area. In addition, since
states cannot aid the sectors in difficulty without incurring the wrath of
the European competitive authority, every monetary accident is bound to
have a political impact. Finally, the coverage of exchange risks that could
remedy the problem are not available to small and medium enterprises
and thus constitute a negation of the integration process. It was, therefore, at this very stage, that the single currency came to be regarded as
the essential follow-up to the single market.
The EMU and the Single European Act of 1987 illustrate the theory
of impulse imbalance. In other words, they are the technical loopholes
(shortcomings) of a former institutional compromise that create the necessity for a new political advance, one that also could have been achieved
through economic manipulation. The Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)
and the free circulation of capital have created an asymmetrical situation profiting Germany. In addition, financial deregulation on a national
level has generated a demand for regulation at a higher level. Balancing
the deal implies an advance in European Union policy. Following
the same model, the transfer of powers to the European Central Bank
creates a void in political legitimacy, a void, in ideal circumstances, that
would be filled by political union. The necessity for a public European
redistributive power has, therefore, become irresistible since in a homogeneous economic space, the adaptation to exogenous shocks cannot be
realized in real terms. However, European public opinion will not accept
that the adjustment must be achieved through unemployment, while, at
the same time, the member states simply wash their political hands of the
whole affair.
Necessity, however acute, cannot achieve the required adjustment, any
more than can the European Commissions entrepreneurial political spirit.
And that is the point at which functionalist explanations fall short. The
centrality of the political moment leads me to my second conclusion: that
the single currency is the necessary counterpoint to German reunification.
From the moment that Germany became a single sovereign state, the EMU
forced it to anchor itself in a process of European integration of a federal
kind. In the process France was offered the opportunity to pass from a
relationship of dependence to one of cooperation with a Germany that
has become the leading European power.
In this event the political will of the president of the French Republic
was not sufficient to bring about the political changes that were necessary,

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263

since he still had to convince his partners in the European Union of the
desirability of the move. The EMU is thus the result of a convergence of
strategies and of ulterior motives. To the United Kingdom, in particular,
it seemed as if liberalization of capital together with financial deregulation would put an end to French constructivism in European affairs. It
was a kind of market consecration. From this point on, the British consistently attempted to curb the process by maintaining an opt-out clause and
by proposing from time to time some alternative solution (the common
currency or the weighted Ecu).
The French strategy, on the other hand, has always been simple: use
the EMU to win in internal influence what it lost in the framework of
the ERM. The German outlook is divided. The liberalization of capital
and the ERM have confirmed Germanys monetary hegemony; the EMU
is thus either pointless or acceptable only at the end of a long process
of real economic convergenceprovided that it reproduces the German
institutional model. Only the political determination to give a guarantee
to France in order to hasten reunification led Hans Dietrich Genscher,
Germanys secretary of foreign affairs, to ignore the opposition of the
Bundesbank and to create the Maastricht compromise of 1992.
The EMU was in large part shaped by French politico-administrative
elites. This was because these elites saw in it a motor for the naturalization
of exterior constraint and for the limitation of the discretionary power
of politicians. In reality, these elites wanted to make the decisions taken
in 1983 irreversible and thereby give themselves larger and more gratifying places in the European framework. As it happened, however, the
people rejected the plans of their enlightened despots. Currency relies
upon confidence, and this makes it hard to create a common currency
wholly within the confines of the offices of monetary experts. The monetary crises of 1992, 1993, and 1994 were attributable less to response
of defiant markets than to the reaction of a hesitant, uncertain, and illinformed public when faced with severe economic policy decisions. As
the turning point of 1983 illustrates, it was political power along with a
nonindependent Central Bank that broke the inflationist mechanism by
resorting to the instruments of a policy of revenues instead of the tools of
monetary policy.1
Would it not then be economically more efficient to call upon the people
in order to create a change in policy? When all is said and done, the
1

Michel Aglietta Lecons pour la Banque Centrale Europeenne, in LIndependance des

banques centrales, Revue dEconomie Financi`ere 22 (Autumn 1992): 3756.

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EMU raises a fearsome question: are we witnessing a technicizing of

a sovereign policy or the federalizing of all the policies of integration
by way of a purely monetary device? The strategy of impulse imbalance
reached its limits with the crisis in the 1990s and the awakening of public
opinion. Two solutions remain open. The first implies a political process in
which the democratic refounding of Europe by means of a single currency
operates as the cornerstone of a new federal Europe. The second consists
in treating the currency as a matter of common consent, entrusted by the
sovereign nations of the Union to an ad hoc organism. This institution
with a limited purpose would nonetheless find in European-wide public
opinion a legitimacy based upon a transfer of confidence from friable local
currencies to an enduring European one.
Next I shall attempt to explain the political arguments of the actors
who negotiated the monetary section of the Maastricht Treaty even while
aware of its technical limits. I then hope to show the way in which the
Communitys experience (the theory of impulse equilibrium) can inspire
adaptations as diverse as a limited monetary union, a reinforced European Council, and even an extension of the coordination of economic
policies leading ultimately to budgetary federalism. The primary goal of
Maastricht was not to resolve a technical problem linked to the management of the currency in a framework of financial globalization; it was,
instead, to take another step toward political integration through deployment of the device of economic constraint.
THE EMU AND THE RENUNCIATION OF SOVEREIGNTY

Among the most uncontested of the prerogatives of the sovereign is the

right to mint money. This privilege is one of the foundational elements of
the modern state. As a unit of account, an intermediary of exchange, and
a reserve of purchasing power, a currency is the quintessential public
good. It unifies the territorial market, homogenizes prices, suppresses
the costs of conversion from one currency to another. Currency being but
minted confidence, it is administered by the state, or more exactly by
one of its branches: the Central Bank.2
In those economies which benefit from freedom of exchange and the
movement of capital, Tommaso Padoa Schioppa has observed, the prerogative of the sovereign, formally uncontested, is in reality limited by
2

Jean-Pierre Patat, LEurope monetaire (Paris: La Decouverte, 1990). In this book Patat
describes these elementary notions with exceptional clarity.

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

265

the freedom of particular people to choose the currency with which they
operate.3
This introduces a double limitation to monetary sovereignty. Firstly,
it is the private actors (in particular the banks) that essentially create
the currency. Their behavior (particularly that of business treasurers) influences most directly the stability of a currency. Secondly, in an open
economy the markets arbitrate daily among currencies, compelling monetary authorities to renounce their discretionary power over rates.4 The
constitution of monetary zones is but a partial response to this loss of
control by individual states. In reality, a zone is always organized around
a dominant currency with prerogatives the others lack. Those others thus
find themselves restricted.
Abandoning ones currency for a new one is either the recognition of
the limits of monetary pluralism in a single marketin which case the
state delegates a limited and specific power to an ad hoc institutionor
it constitutes part of the process whereby a federation of states is created
whose substance and legitimacy could be found only in approval of a
federal constitution by the citizens of those states. In the first instance,
the source of legitimacy remains national since jurisdiction remains an
indefinable prerogative of the national state. The best proof of this is to
be found in the very process by which control over any national currency is
relinquishedin this instance the treaty. What one treaty does can always
be undone by another, since intergovernmental coordination is not part
of any constitutional process. In the second instance, the single currency
and the European Central Bank, along with other institutional devices,
constitute the components of a new political-institutional order. Contrary
to popular opinion, one cannot go to sleep French and wake up European
by means of a series of institutional shifts and the cumulative effects of
reassigning public policies. There must be an act capable of manifesting
the popular will.
The authority over a territory (its sovereign character, the power to do
and to undo) clearly defined the limits of the modern nation-statethat
is to say, the entity within which, according to Ernest Gellner, is found
the identity of a people, of a territory, of a culture, of a state, and of the
3
4

Tommaso Padoa Schioppa, Union monetaire et concurrence des monnaies en Europe,

Commentaire 54 (1991): 5478.
The suspicion by the French of the French currency from 1945 to 1983, and their readiness at present, as evidenced by the opinion polls, to abandon the franc for the Euro
demonstrates that in France, the sacralization of the national currency is not as strong as
it is in Germany.

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principle of political legitimacy.5 Is the EMU a step toward the abandonment of the nation-state and a move toward federation? Or can monetary
policy still be controlled by a delegation of powers by sovereign states to
increase collective authority over policies that are essential to economic
regulation? To answer these questions I must identify more precisely what
is at stake in monetary union and explain how and why the European
states have come to this position.

THE EMU AND THE THEORY OF IMPULSE IMBALANCE

The Europe that has been constructed so far has made extensive use of
economic means to achieve its political goals. The law and the market
operated, not as a substitute to the political will, but as the political will
in disguise. At the same time, however, monetary Europe has been the
necessary outcome of economic integration and the most obvious solution
to economic crises.
We do not have to go back to the European Union of Payments, created
in 1950, or to the European Monetary Agreement of 1955, which organized a specifically European margin of fluctuation in relation to the U.S.
dollar in the framework of Bretton Woods (0.75 percent to 1 percent), to
see that the Marjolin Report since 1962 has established monetary union as
the third step toward European unification. Following the customs union
and the common market, the Werner Report in 1970 proposed the realization by 1980 of a monetary union with the complete and irreversible
convertibility of currencies, the elimination of margins of fluctuation of
exchange, the irrevocable setting of parity relations and the liberation of
movements of capital throughout the whole of Europe.6 The Werner
Report anticipated an economic union founded on the coordination of
economic policies, the harmonization of budgetary and fiscal policies,
the transfer to the Community of monetary policy as well as short-term
macroeconomic policy and medium-term programming.
The crisis began with U.S. president Richard Nixons decision to suspend the gold convertibility of the dollar. This decision curbed the practical realization of community objectives because of the free floating of
currencies and at the same time compelled the Europeans to become

5
6

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983).

The Werner Report, Rapport au Conseil et a` la Commission concernant la realisation
de lUnion Economique et Monetaire dans la Communaute, Supplement au Bulletin 11
des Communautes Europeennes, 1970.

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

267

aware of the necessity of monetary stability in an economic zone en route

to integration. On March 21, 1972, the monetary snake was created.
This allowed European currencies to vary within limits of plus or minus
2.25 percent. In 1978, however, it became necessary to rework the plan.
On the initiative of German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French president Valery Giscard dEstaing, the ERM was created on December 5,
1978. A system of stable but adjustable exchange rates, the ERM was
intended to evolve into full monetary union. But the second oil crisis, the
adoption of divergent macroeconomic policies, and widespread monetary
disorder compelled the different countries involved to turn, once again, to
the discretionary handling of exchange ratesmonetary policies and nontariff obstacles to exchanges being the only devices capable of preserving
the balance between national, political, and social interests.
The paralysis of the European Community during the crisis years 1974
to 1978 rendered monetary integration less urgent and less likely. The
Single European Act of 1987 that revived the process of integration should
have included a monetary section. But the context for the renewal of monetary construction had changed radically. In the first place, monetary policy was no longer directed only at monetary stability and the fight against
inflation. Now it encompassed expansion and full employment. In the second, the realization of the enlarged market in 1992 was achieved by the
freeing of all movement of capital, and especially by the financial services
that constituted a powerful mechanism of financial deregulation.7 Finally,
an ever-increasing number of European countries sought monetary stability within the limits of the ERM. As a result, the German mark became the
anchoring point for all the European currencies, and the German central
bank the sole possessor of power in matters of monetary policy.
On January 6, 1988, the deficiencies of the European monetary code
once again compelled the European states to revise it. On that occasion
Frances prime minister, Edouard Balladur, declared on television that the
time has come to examine the possibility of creating a European central
bank which would manage a common currency. The ERM, he said, does
not really work for me. . . . [I]ts functioning is neither very egalitarian nor
is it complete.8 The leader of a party known for its coolness toward
7

See Kenneth Dyson, Elusive Union (London and New York: Longman, 1994). He explains
how the argument for the necessary liberalization of the movement of capital as a prerequisite to any discussion on the realization of monetary union allowed the English and the
Germans to block French objectives of a monetary integration for a considerable time.
Quoted in Pascal Riche and Charles Wypolsz, eds., LUnion Economique et Monetaire
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1993).

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Europe was calling for a decisive advance in the construction of a closer

European union. Once again the institutional machine invented by Jean
Monnet was set into motion.
Each advance in economic integration creates an economic and political imbalance whose victims aspire to escape by the topby means,
that is, of a new political strategyand unless they are able to do so,
the entire system will malfunction. A new political contract negotiated
by the twelve Member States at the time establishes a new game plan.
The contract is then passed to the Commission. Thanks to its monopoly
on initiative, the Commission is able to give the contract technical consistency before handing it over to private actors who set in motion the
European Court of Justice, which, in turn, legally unifies the European
markets. With the EMU the mechanism functions according to the same
design, only here the stakes are different. Since monetary union requires
economic convergence, which implies control of budgetary policies and
a form of redistribution among the European regions, it cannot be
achieved without political union, yet that union must be one in which the
surrender of active powers does not effectively empty the democratic process of all significance. The negotiation process of the Maastricht Treaty
clearly illustrates this chain of events and its limits.
In Hanover in June of 1988, the Twelve decided upon the formation
of a committee of experts charged with reporting to the European Council on the feasibility of monetary union. One year later the Delors Report
was adopted in Madrid, and the first political mediations were submitted
to the Council. At this point the Council was divided between partisans of
the immediate leap and partisans of what was called the crowning strategy. According to this strategy, union would be achieved only after the
full completion of macroeconomic convergence. The Guigou paper (the
report of a coordinating committee created by the French president) on
the problems posed by monetary union provided a veritable inventory of
the instruments and institutions of monetary policy. Ornamenting it was a
series of sketches for the institutional architecture that would permit the
reconciliation of an efficient monetary policy with respect for national
sovereignties. The latter was introduced under the notion of subsidiarity, coupled to the Germanic theory of the separation of monetary power
attributed to an independent central bank from budgetary power that
would be handled by the federal chancellery.
In the autumn of 1989, however, history intervened. The Soviet Empire
crumbled, and against the advice of the Bundesbank, Chancellor Helmut
Kohl announced in early 1990 an economic, monetary, and social Union

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

269

with East Germany for July 1990.9 West Germany obtained support from
its European partners and, most importantly, the (albeit reticent) approval
of France. In return, West Germany offered a firm commitment to the
accelerated realization of the EMU, even though the Bundesbank was
simultaneously demanding a ten-year moratorium in order to manage
the integration of East Germany. In April 1990 the stakes were raised
still higher with the Kohl-Mitterrand proposal to conduct the EMU and
political union at the same time.
The final negotiations began in Rome on December 15, 1990. The
Bundesbank formally had no say in the matter, since negotiations were
concerned with establishing a new system of exchange. Nonetheless, it
insisted on ensuring that the mark was abandoned only for an equally
solid monetary unit. The European Central Bank had to be an exact replica
of the Bundesbank, or at least as independent and dedicated to the fight
against inflation. The barter was concluded along the following lines: the
sharing of monetary power was granted to the Twelve in exchange for
allowing Germany to set the rules of the game. The famous article 107 of
the Treaty states:
In the exercise of powers and in the accomplishment of the missions and duties
which have been conferred by the present treaty and by the statutes of the ESBC
(European System of Central Banks), neither the European Central Bank, nor
any national central bank, nor any member of their decision-making bodies may
solicit or accept instructions from community institutions or bodies, from administrations of the Member States, or from any other organisation. The Community
institutions and bodies, as well as the administrations of Member States, commit
themselves to respect this principle and will not look to influence the members of
the decision-making bodies of the European Central Bank or the national central
banks in the accomplishment of their missions.10

But what exactly is the EMU? The question is perhaps best answered
in terms of its salient features. It is a process that organizes the progressive
9

10

This is the first of the three crises that led to the abolition of the ERM. Karl Otto
Poehl, then head of the Bundesbank, claimed this decision would ruin East Germany
and bring about massive financial transfers from the West to the East. In the absence
of a courageous fiscal policy, this could only renew inflation. His analysis proved to be
perfectly correct. Chancellor Kohl was convinced that historical opportunities must be
seized. The presence of Gorbachev in the Kremlin made reunification possible; from then
on the German administration had to follow. The promise of the paradise of the West
as a welcoming gift to the brothers from the East, and the promise made to the citizens
of the West that reunification would cost them nothing, were the best means to achieve
rapid reunification. To Kohl, it was obvious that the administration would follow his
lead. Europe paid dearly for this strategy.
Les traites de Rome et de Maastricht (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1992), 68.

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transition from a situation marked by the diversity of national monetary

systems to a common monetary system based on a single currency, the
Euro, controlled by a European system of central banks whose center
of influence is the European Central Bank. The EMU also is a powerful
machine for economic convergence. Its essential tools are the criteria of
convergence themselves and the structural funds. The policies designed
to meet the criteria contract activity when necessary, while the funds help
the poorer members of the union to expand. Finally, coupled with political union, the EMU is a means for shifting the boundaries of politics
and economic strategies, both national and supranational. In this respect,
however, it suffers from three basic weaknesses: it is the product of intergovernmental diplomatic agreement, which must survive highly risky
periods of transition, it is at the mercy of the markets, and it is at the
mercy of exogenous shocks.
THE STRATEGY OF COMPETITIVE DEFLATION INSCRIBED
IN THE STONE OF INSTITUTIONS

Why, then, have the European nations, and especially the largest among
them, France and Germany, committed themselves to a process that, while
promising, is exposed to considerable risks? Why are these nationstheir
administrations, their political elites, and their trade unionsconvinced
that only the solutions extolled by ultra-libertarians and Friedmanian
monetarists can bring about European unification? To constitutionalize
maximum deficits, separate monetary and budgetary policies, confer monetary policy upon an independent central bank: these are the great principles of the EMU. Its theoretical sources are to be found in the writings
of Milton Friedman, but they are hardly applied with rigor even in the
United States.
In the sixties during a period of full expansion, at the initiative of
the Trilateral, a global think-tank, illustrious men and women tried
hard to resolve the crisis of the western democracies. Rampant inflation
was eating away at the acquisitions of growth, making covert transfers
and, above all, revealing the states incapacity to contain this movement.
The established diagnosis questioned the governability of democratic market societies. In reality, the impersonal mechanisms of the market, the
rigidity of salaries and prices, and the weight of social oligopoly were
thought to be responsible for serious limits on the states regulative capacity. Various solutions were considered that would have placed a check
on the politicians and prohibited them from giving in to demands that

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

271

might hurt the economy. Among these solutions, one enjoyed considerable popularity: prohibition of budgetary deficit by formal inscription
in the constitution. But it was the separation of monetary and budgetary policies that offered a lasting solution. An independent central
bank, restricted solely to the fight against inflation and not required to
coordinate its actions with the actions of those in charge of the budgetary policy, would, it was believed, limit the arbitrariness of political decisions.11 The hypothesis is now a familiar one: an independent
central bank is reputed to be more credible because it is sheltered from
political pressure and can thus avoid inopportune, election-timed reflation policies. Such a bank can take a long-term approach and adapt
its short-term aims. A dependent central bank is compelled to change
its conduct and continually revise its aims in order to meet short-term
objectives. Finally, an independent central bank acts in accordance with
a pre-established code instead of multiplying discretionary interventions.
An independent central banks voluntary commitment or a mandate to
pursue only one goalfighting inflationconfers upon it an uncontested
credibility.
Germanys remarkable performance in the fight against inflation progressively elevated its monetary policy to the status of a model in the
1980s. The institutional factorthe Bundesbanks independencecame
to be regarded as the sole explanation for Germanys stability and performance. The context for this successthe institutionalized social compromise and salary moderationand its historical mooringsthe Ordnungspolitikwere forgotten. After the Left took power in France in 1981,
three consecutive devaluations convinced a number of administrative
authorities of the excellence of the German model.
The economic administration of France, or (if one prefers) the economic decision-making community (Treasury, Bank of France, private
governments of financial and industrial groups), would not have committed themselves to the EMU project if its cardinal objective since March
1983 had not been to create an institutional foundation for competitive
deflation, while removing from political control the discretionary manipulation of the currency. The following statements in a 1992 issue of Haute
11

See Robert Barro and David Gordon, Rules, Discretion and Reputation in a Model
of Monetary Policy, Journal of Monetary Economics (July 1983): 10122; and Finn
Kydland and Edward Prescott, Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of
Optimal Plans, Journal of Political Economy 85 (June 1977). They offered a theoretical
foundation for this proposal by establishing that independent central banks were more
credible than governments in fighting inflation.

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Finance illustrate this with clarity:

Maastricht brings with it the assurance of an irreversible attachment of our country to the European Community, to a solid currency, to an economic policy centred
on the stability of prices and the control of public deficits. The Treaty thus contributes in a decisive fashion to the reduction of uncertainties as to the future
policies of each successive administration. There is no longer any alternative to
the policy of a stable Franc and competitive deflation.12
The value of the currency will be less at the mercy of the hazards of political life,
which has often been its fate in the past.13

Competitive deflation thus became a form of political technology inscribed in the workings of the economy. In its initial phases this mechanism permits the naturalization of political choice in exterior economic
constraints, but at cruising speed it is able to deploy its full force without
recourse to political deliberation.
It is not, however, sufficient to remove from political control the discretionary manipulation of the currency. The credibility of the whole system
demands the creation of a European system of central banks (ESCB). The
sole and unique mission of the ESCB is to oversee the stability of the
currency while combating the risks of inflation. It is even less a question
of adopting the German monetary system, which gives the illusion of being merely the importation of a partial model created by an institutional
system with strong internal coherence. As Michel Aglietta has observed,
The foundation of its [the Central Banks] independence stems from the uniqueness and the irreducible singularity of its role in the society. The confidence in
the currency is none other than the popular anticipation that this role will be
continually and duly assumed.14

But what about institutional legitimacy in a democratic society? The

German monetary order, Aglietta reminds us, is based upon a principle
that reconciles de jure and de facto independence; it is a constitutional
order with a quasi-religious essence. This explains why the question
of parliamentary control is never raised. Thus, something that could be
obtained by custom, ethos, a common history, or even the traumatization
of the collective conscience of the German people that followed the hyperinflation of the 1920s would now be obtained by the multiplication of
trials and strict codification of powers and jurisdictions.
12
13
14

Daniel Leb`egue, Les Banques au grand large, Haute Finance 14 (1992).

Ernest Antoine Seilli`ere in Haute Finance 14 (1992).
Aglietta, Lecons pour la Banque Centrale Europeenne, 46.

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273

The mechanism of the convergence criteria is a masterpiece in the application of force through technical devices. At the same time it is a response
to accusations of illegitimacy. None of the criteria employed, however, is
persuasive for the economist. In the first place, the rules of good budgetary
management will tolerate a deficit from the moment that it is inferior to
the sum of investments. Criteria limiting the budgetary deficit to 3 percent
of the GDP and a public debt/GDP ratio set at 60 percent are thus more
severe than the codes of financial prudence require.15 Moreover, no criteria of real economic convergence has been offered for productivity, or
for employment, or for competition, or for the state of the economy as
a whole. Finally, no indication has been offered as to what the central
macroeconomic criteria monitored by the European Central Bank will be
after the realization of the third phase. The whole technical disposition,
from this point on, is analyzed as the setting, on the initiative of French
and German central banks, of indicators close to the Bundesbanks implicit objectives in its management of the mark.
Five criteria have now been linked and systematized.16 The first of
these, established immediately to curb inflation, prohibits rates of inflation
higher than 1.5 percent in relation to the average inflation rate of the three
European countries with the lowest rates of inflation. The second criterion
stated that the average nominal long-term interest rate must not exceed
by more than 2 percent the rates observed in the three least inflationist
countries; this means that anticipation of inflation in the long term must
play a role in any final calculation. The third criterion allowed for an
accelerated passage to the single currency, and for its final realization
in 1999. This criterion could not be achieved unless, in addition, the
exchange rate had been maintained for two years without serious tension,
which means that all monetary adjustments had to be real.
As long as budgetary policy does not derive from a transfer of powers,
individual states will remain in controlif, that is, there exist financial
markets where the rates for financing deficits are freely fixed. In practice
this is the case with the federal states, and the Union should, therefore,
leave control of budgetary policy to national governments. But the haunting memory of spiraling inflation, and the leanness of the Community,
mean that the financing of deficits can have a serious impact on inflation
levels.
15

16

When the criteria were set, the performance of France was twice as great: the deficit/GDP
ratio was at 1.5 percent and the debt/GDP ratio was around 30 percent. This performance
can be explained by the very strong growth in France from 1988 to the middle of 1990.
Wiplosz and Riche, Lunion monetaire.

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The two remaining budgetary criteria are the limitation of the budgetary deficit to 3 percent of the GDP and the maintenance at less than
60 percent of the ratio of public debt to GDP. In fact, both criteria are intended to limit the possibilities for maneuver open to nation-states and to
prevent any single government unable to control public expenditure from
being tempted to turn to the monetary financing of its debtexactly what
is happening in Germany. When the industrialists give in to unions or the
state abandons itself to lax policies, the central bank, by managing the
currency, is able to call the offending parties to order. Adjustments, however, cannot be painless: monetary revival is forbidden. The sole solution
for correcting an imbalance resides in the adaptation of the real economy
and thus in the renegotiation of the social contract.
But the authors of the Maastricht Treaty wanted to impose additional
controls on the individual states. They forbade the national treasuries
from financing themselves through privileged relations with the national
central banks. In practice, this was pointless since the treasuries had long
since abandoned such temporary solutions. Nevertheless, the measure
was retained as a token that allowed the drafters to provide a form of
legal sanction against any state that had resorted to such strategies as an
easy way out of its difficulties and might be tempted to do so again. The
measure also had the advantage of abbreviating the relations between the
monetary and budgetary policies and thereby rendering the central banks
independent.17 Likewise, the freeing of the movement of capital makes
it impossible to recreate any form of credit limitation. On the grounds,
however, that two guarantees are better than one, when signing the treaty,
France chose not to employ this monetary facility in case of a need to
correct a budgetary disequilibrium.
Economic and monetary Europe is not, therefore, the offspring of the
European Communitys will. Rather, it is the creature of a cartel of national administrative elites who, once granted political power, preferred to
naturalize the demands of structural adjustment by calling for European
constraint. The locus of this bureaucratic cartel was the Economics and
Finance Committee. In informal meetings a European monetary elite
forged a common language and achieved, with the EMU, a work of considerable political inventiveness. The denunciation of the bureaucracy in
Brussels should thus be seen as an act of political communication, as an
17

See Pierre Jaillet and Christian Pfister, Du SME a` la monnaie unique, Economie &
Statistique 23 (1993): 29.

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275

avowal by the political actors of the impossibility of reaching an agreement on monetary policy through political deliberation.
THE EMU : A STRATEGY FOR WINNING
MONETARY INFLUENCE

One of the principal French arguments in favor of monetary integration

and a single currency stems from Frances desire to remedy the asymmetry
in the European monetary system. For reasons that have to do with the influence of the German economy, its credibility, and its long-term stability,
the mark became the anchor currency of the ERM. This found theoretical
expression in economist Robert Mundells triangle of incompatibility,
introduced into the vocabulary of the Community from the writings of
Tommaso Padoa Schioppa.18
The idea is simple: in a monetary system of bilateral parities, a sole
country can freely determine its monetary policy, thereby furnishing the
anchoring point of the system. One cannot, as Mundell points out, simultaneously control monetary and exchange policies in a situation of
free circulation of capital. Once a country such as France frees the circulation of capital and attempts to control its exchange rate, it loses all
discretionary power in matters of monetary policy.19 Inversely, Germany
has seen the parity of its currency against the U.S. dollar and the yen
fixed by the markets and is nevertheless in complete control of its own
monetary policy. Since Germany and France are in the same monetary
zone, because they are bound by the same exchange rate mechanism, and
since the ensemble of currencies is determined in relation to the mark, it
is the Bundesbank that sets the interest rates. All of the other countries of
the European Union must adapt to these rates in order to maintain their
parities in relation to the mark. They must even accept the incorporation
into their interest rates of a prime corresponding to the anticipated risk
of the realignment of partiesthat is to say, to the deficit of credibility.
Frances strategy was to ensure that the de facto surrender of all discretionary power in matters of monetary policy would be compensated for
by an influential role in the European Central Bank and, simultaneously,
to subject this role capacity to a democratic principle, the European
economic government made up of the secretaries of economy and of
18
19

Padoa Schioppa, Union monetaire.

The free circulation of capital became effective on July 1, 1990.

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finance. Although France had hoped to secure from Germany the sacrifice of the mark and the Bundesbank, it had no desire to place any pressure
on German economic administration. To do that would have been to question the underlying principles of the German monetary system, which the
Europeans were, in practice, adopting in exchange for Germanys renunciation of the mark. All that now remains of this project, however, is a
vague formula for the setting of the principal orientations of the Member States economic policy by the heads of state and their secretaries of
finance.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 suddenly rendered possible the
acceleration on paper of the European project while postponing its realization. The reasons are economic dynamics, the incompatibility of
the public policies pursued by France and Germany, and the German
Central Banks rejection of a strategy contrary to its fundamental charter, its sociology, and its professional culture. In the autumn of 1989, the
French geo-strategic assets were brutally devalued. The crumbling of the
Soviet bloc made a political alliance with France less crucial for Germany
while reunification awoke in France the fantasy of an all-powerful
Germany and of a drift to the East. Secretary Genscher, therefore, wanted
to accord to France the possibility of an equally decisive political role
in the framework of the federal Europe, then in the process of being
created. The EMU, coupled with political union, should have been a
relief to France, which had just witnessed the sudden reunification of
Germany.
Without measuring all the implications, France relinquished its policy of autonomy and self-control for a strategy of influence. What it was
unable to obtain as a nation in full control of its currency, it thought to
acquire by deploying a strategy of influence at the heart of a Europe of
the Twelve strengthened by a European Germany. For the central corps
of French politico-administrative elites, Europe is as much a multiplier of
force as it is a market and a vague assembly in the service of interminable
discussion. A fragmented Europe has no weight in monetary or commercial mattersnor, of course, in defense and diplomatic matters. A unified
Europe, on the other hand, would be the leading economic force in the
world and capable of making international commercial rules. It also could
undermine the power of the dollar, make the Euro into a (and possibly the)
reserve currency, and ultimately form, with the United States and Japan,
a world directoire, a G3. Because of the determination to make this into
a reality, an agreement was reached, despite the difficulties of setting in
motion such an obviously imbalanced construction as the EMU.

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277

THE CENTRAL BANKS AGAINST THE MARKETS

The second phase of the creation of the Euro was, as we have seen,
the most hazardous. A series of crises jeopardized the process of European integration. The management of these crises constitutes a useful
guide to understanding the motives behind the Franco-German desire for
integration.
Between July 1992 and August 1993, the ERM suffered significant
destabilization, thus distancing the prospects of the EMU at the very moment that its ratification process was coming to a close. This has generally
been attributed to the irrepressible force of the markets, the Anglo-Saxon
conspiracy against the EMU, the lack of realism of ERM structures of parity while the economies of the member countries were still divergent, the
provincialism of a Bundesbank insensitive to its European commitment,
and, finally, to the political hesitations of the French Right. It would be
pointless merely to enumerate all of these contributing factors. But the
sequence of events after German reunification does allow us to rank them
in order of importance.
To control reunification and contain nascent inflation, the Bundesbank
asked Chancellor Kohl to reevaluate the mark. A reevaluated currency
favors imports and complicates exports. It incites industrialists to show
their rigor in internal management (salaries, prices, productive organization, and so on), which acts as a cooling agent for inflationist tensions.
France, which had rightly prided itself on practicing a strategy of competitive deflation based on the German model, refused to do the same.
Despite this divergence, the ERM survived, and currencies such as the
peseta, the lire, and then the British pound, which were manifestly overvalued, remained or entered into the ERM.20 While Europe was negotiating Maastricht, the anticipation of European integration by the markets
operators was so strong that they considered economic and monetary
disadjustments (and even an exogenous shock as massive as the reunification) to be negligible. As Patrick Artus and Jacques Salomon have
written:
The reduction of the differences between Germanys interest rates and those of its
partners since 1987 has progressively led to the inversion of the credibility argument: by adhering to the exchange mechanism, a country would import credibility,
20

The entry of sterling into the ERM in October of 1990 was achieved without coordination and at an unjustified level of parity. This happened even though the coordina
tion of parity with other ERM partners is required by the Bale-Nybourg
agreements
of 1987.

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and all else being equal, would be permitted to reduce the cost of its deflationary
adjustments.21

When a credible political prospect exists, governments can impose

their views on the markets, even in a climate of financial deregulation
and the asynchronous development of their economies. Sovereignty is
not, therefore, abdicated in favor of the markets. Actually, it is imposed
upon them by the political workings and coordinating mechanisms of the
central banks and their national governments.
The first speculative assault on the pound in 1992 occurred after the
Danish No and the reticent French Yes in their respective referenda, and after the British government had allowed wage inflation to
develop. This hit a country that did not intend to join the EMU (having
secured an opt-out clause) and had not practiced the necessary cooperation with Germany.22 Beginning in September of 1992, the prospect
of European integration seemed increasingly less likely, and the battle
waged and won against the pound by speculators once again obliged the
French and German governments to face up to their responsibilities. They
then had three options: (1) escape by the top following the model of
impulse imbalance, which implied an acceleration of the EMU timetable
and the realization of a small Franco-German Euro zone with the Belgians,
the Danish, and the Dutch, (2) withdraw the mark by detaching it
from the ERM exchange mechanism, or (3) maintain their initial schedule
for integration in the hope that the markets would not realize how distant
the prospect of integration had actually become following Franco-German
economic divergence.
The first of these solutions was rejected by the French government,
even though it was supported by the financial administration, since France
could not participate in what would have seemed to be a mark zone. The
Germans equally rejected this solution because it implied a renegotiation
of the Maastricht Treaty. The second solution, which had been set aside
at the moment of reunification, seemed even less credible once speculation had intensified, if only because of the disintegration of the mark
21
22

Patrick Artus and Jacques Salomon cited by Jaillet and Pfister, Du SME a` la monnaie
unique.
Mairi Maclean, Le Mercredi noir et le dilemme Britannique du systeme de taux de
change: cooperation Europeenne ou splendide isolement? Relations internationales et
strategiques 11 (1993): 15164. She tells how Black Wednesday, which saw the pound
crumble and Britain withdraw from the ERM, was preceded by repeated warnings by the
Bundesbank on the unrealistic attempts at pound/deutschemark parity of 1 = 2.95 DM.
She describes how, at Bath, the proposal made by the Bundesbank for a realignment of
parities was not even discussed, and how the ministers and governors present intended
to accept only one policy: the lowering of German rates.

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

279

mini-zone created between the Germans and the Dutch. Consequently, the
third solution imposed itself. Fed by the rise of an anti-European discourse
at the core of the French Right and by the Bundesbanks reaffirmation of
its constitutional prerogatives, it opened the way to speculation.
The debacle of the French Left during the 1993 legislative elections
removed powerful support for a strong franc and placed the future of the
ERM in the hands of a divided French government and a German Central
Bank determined no longer to allow measures of questionable efficiency
to be imposed upon it or upon the weakened image of a unified Europe.
Efforts by the Balladur government to persuade the Bundesbank to lower
its rates, and the failed attempt to pass the short-term rates below those of
the Germans, actually weakened the franc. The intensity of the debate in
France over the other policy, the continuing deterioration of its employment situation, and the irrationality (from the viewpoint of short-term
national economic interests) of a policy of strong rates forced the French
government to pressure the Bundesbank in the name of Franco-German
entente. Political consensus at the heart of the French governmental majority appeared impossible to achieve, however. The crisis of 1993, coming
after that of 1992, illustrates the difficulties of a cooperative strategy in
monetary matters in a context where Germany spoke with two voices and
France maintained two discourses: one rigorous and directed toward the
exterior, the other permissive and intended wholly for internal use. But
Europe is a dynamic that creates unstable states. One cannot break this
dynamic and then wonder why market actors recommence their games,
for it is precisely in this dynamic that their legitimacy resides.
With the collapse of the ERM demonstrated by the adoption of large
margins of fluctuation, are markets triumphing over national states that
would render vain the constructivist efforts to create a single European currency? Not really. Markets do not conspire. We cannot attribute
a will to them even if, at a given moment, a central current of opinions is formed on the fate of a currency.23 However, the central banks
23

See Frederic Lordon, Financial Markets, Credibility, and Sovereignty, in Revue de

lobservatoire Francais des Conjunctiures Economiques 50 (1994): 10324. According
to Lordon, the operators of the Anglo-Saxon market pursue proper political objectives:
keeping Europe from appearing as a decisive actor on the world stage. These ambitions are
congruent with their professional objectives, since it would be more profitable to speculate
on the parities of the fifteen European currencies than to operate with just one of them: the
Euro. Political strategy and professional interests converge so that the market operators,
in contempt of actual economic data, can make and unmake currencies, assured as they
are of the effectiveness of the easily led rationality of currency speculators. Lordons
hypothesis makes sense only when the standard economic and political analysis runs
aground. Political, economic, and institutional timetables with their accidents, and their
telescoping delivery explanations, would seem to dispense with the need for conspiracy
theories.

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and the administrations can manifest a desire and then translate it into
action. What has happened since Black Thursday, when the Bundesbank refused to lower rates, triggering speculation that resulted in the
removal of the tight margin constituted by the ERM? The devaluation
of the franc and the lowering of rates simply did not work, and even
the public rebuke that the obstinate Gauls received from three leading
American economistsFranco Modiglianu, Paul Samuelson, and Robert
Solowdid not change anything. The French authorities desire to bring
the franc to a parity with the mark as close as possible to that which prevailed before Black Thursday is the most tangible manifestation of this
obstinacy.
Paradoxically, we have here an illustration, in the worst context, of how
influential the state can be within the framework of a multilateral action
intended to consolidate a monetary zone. The setting of secret parity
objectives, the maintenance of rates at a high level and their progressive
slackening, and the permanent consultation with other central banks have
created a highly unpredictable situation for markets and speculators.
In May of 1996, the franc re-entered the tight margin of the ERM,
thus erasing completely what had happened in the summer of 1993. In
December of 1995, in Madrid, the principle of the passage to phase three
was confirmed, and on January 1, 1999, the Euro officially came into
existence.24 When the markets reopened on January 4, 1999, eleven countries made the transition to the Euro without mishap. The system of parity
between the various European countries in effect at the closure of the markets in 1998 became fixed. The national currencies of those countries are
now fractions of the Euro.

24

Until December 1995 three scenarios were imaginable. In the Big Bang scenario, the
fifteen are able, in view of the Maastricht criteria, to allow a significant number of states
(necessarily including France and Germany) and to negotiate a code on parities with
nonqualifying countries. The Euro is adopted as the common currency, and a European
Central Bank is established in Frankfurt on January 1, 1999. In the mark-CFA scenario,
the absence of any real convergence of economies prohibits the realization of phase
three. For political and economic reasons France agrees to link the franc and the mark in
perpetuity by adopting a stable and irrevocable franc-mark parity. A European currency
exists: the mark. In the stopping-of-the-clock scenario, the principal EU countries do not
achieve the Maastricht criteria and decide to wait for the budgetary consolidation plans
to take effect. In each case, the criteria only present an obstacle because the member
states want it that way. The Treaty leaves the door open to debudgetizing operations that
can mask lax budgetary policies thanks to the artifices of accounting presentation. In
late 1995 the political signal was given in Madrid: the Big Bang became the scenario
toward which the central banks and the financial institutions have been working since
March 1996. This is the scenario that will be realized provided no unforeseeable development or catastrophe takes place before 2002.

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281

EUROPE AFTER THE EURO

Although the Euro is now firmly established, the zones of uncertainty

remain large. What policy mix will be required when the rhythms of economic growth between the different nations of Europe begin to diverge?
What will be the real power of the central and national monetary agencies
when all the responsibilities for control remain national? What tools will
the Union possess to prohibit the less disciplined states from free-rider
abuses? Today economists debate the criteria retained for the stability
pact. They question the usefulness of coordinating economic policies in
a more or less formal framework, the necessity of communitarizing prudential control, and the degree of harmonization of structural policies.25
The fetishization of the criteria of convergence (demonstrated concurrently by the French governments call for a notarial application after
suggesting several widely different options and by the German governments refusal to modify its position in relation to any of the current
trends) provided striking examples of the transformation of a technique
into a policy. The moment the criteria were decided upon, Europe entered a phase of euphoric growth of around 4 percent, public finances improved everywhere (the deficit ratio of public administrations to GDP was
at 1.5 percent in 1989), consumption was stimulated by a drop in taxes
and by the effect of the wealth occasioned by the inflating of the financial bubble, and investment was particularly vigorous. The Europeans, the
Americans, and the Japanese all wanted to be present before the liberalization of the market in 1993. The economists thus witnessed a surprisingly
strong recovery. They had not expected it so soon after the crash of 1987.
Classically, they were anticipating the continuation of the movement of
growth. Nobody at the time denounced the lack of realism, or the severity
of the criteria that had been devised for integrating Germany, France, and
the countries of the mark zone. Italy was certainly in an objectively more
difficult situation because of its deficits and its debts, but the prevailing
opinion was that if it would commit itself decisively to the realization of
its structural adaptation plan, Italy could be retrieved.
The first snag in this idyllic tableau resulted from Germanys decision to
finance reunification by means of debt. The second occurred after France
25

The exchange policy constitutes a first limitation on the effective realization of independence. It is the same for the interactions between monetary policy, lender of last resort,
and prudential supervision. Prudential supervision, for example, was not included among
the powers of the First European Central Bank. As Michel Aglietta notes, subsidiarity
plus independence of central banks equals fragility in a deregulated universe. See Aglietta,
Lecons pour la Banque Centrale Europeenne.

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refused to sanction the uncoupling of the coordinated franc-mark in order to guide the transition. The third snag appeared when Britain and
Italy allowed their currencies to be re-evaluated without controlling inflation. With the recession and the debates over the ratification of the
Maastricht Treaty, technico-political consensus ended up dividing Member States and their respective political elites. For economists preoccupied
with the macroeconomic regulation of the whole, the stubbornness of
France in asking everything from the budget in order not to threaten the
franc-mark parity aggravated the employment situation and the financial
health of banks and other financial enterprises because of the excessively
rigorous character of its monetary policy. It also threatened conditions
of real convergence since the charge of the debt was bound to reduce
progressively the degrees of liberty in budgetary matters.26
As noted earlier, criteria technically defined to meet a specific and contingent need were inscribed in a treaty. The major political consequences
soon became evident. The cost of abandoning respect for the criteria of
convergence, even if they are not very reliable, is high. A political interpretation can always be given to any revision of technical indicators. The
obstinate desire to set up the Euro on the agreed date forced the Member States to carry out policies of convergence that objectively weakened
their economies and increased unemployment. The calamitous prospect
of a rupture of the integration process and several hasty thoughts on the
benefits of the Euro in terms of employment and activity were sufficient
to maintain the program of 1989/90 at all costs.
The question of criteria automatically posed another problem. What
discipline of management should be adopted now that monetary union has
been achieved? Formally, there was nothing that obliged the member states
to coordinate their budgetary policies. This is, at least, what the Twelve
had decided at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. In practice, however,
in the name of the fight against inflation, a stability pact strictly limiting
deficits had been adopted in Dublin in 1996 and confirmed at Amsterdam
in 1997. The reason for such a decision is simple: if any one country within
an integrated monetary zone practices a lax budgetary policy, all of the
countries in that zone run the risk of inflation. The stability pact is a
budgetary policing weapon that limits authorized deficits, establishes a
system of penalties for offenders, and defines a consultation procedure
26

See Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Le debat interdit (Paris: Arlea, 1995), which has become the
manual of the party of the other policy. Fitoussi is one of the most vigorous critics of
the monetary orthodoxy of the Bank of France.

The Euro, Economic Federalism, and National Sovereignty

283

to evaluate the exceptional character of any deficit. The stability pact

is not a cooperative budgetary policy, much less a community one. It
is rather a quasi-automatic anti-inflationary weapon that completes the
arsenal of the independent central bank.
Since then, however, the problem of how to coordinate the separate
policies of the fifteen member states has become acute. Firstly, it is easy to
imagine that, faced with a single authority in charge of a single currency,
the fifteen budgetary authorities would have no alternative but to endorse
the general objectives of the stability pact. Secondly, any country that fell
victim to the shock of asymmetrical demand, instead of benefiting from
the aid of a nonexistent European federal budget, would be penalized.
Finally, in the absence of a responsible political authority on the European
level, and faced with the powerlessness of the nation-states bound by the
rules of budgetary discipline, the European Central Bank would inevitably
become the scapegoat to national public opinions. Thus, if an integrated
Europe does not wish to forgo all macroeconomic policies, it must invent
a European policy mix. Otherwise, the actual policy of stimulation or
of restriction of Europe would be the result of the unintentional sum of
fifteen budgetary policies and a federal monetary policy.
For a number of economists, budgetary federalism is the logical followup, in an integrated economic space, to a single currency and a single
market. The reasoning is simple: each country adhering to an integrated
monetary zone loses ipso facto access to the weapons of monetary and exchange rate policies. Any economic imbalance demands that real changes
be made to that nations policies on salaries, employment, and migration.
If European migration remains limited and reallocation is unwelcome to
the remaining inhabitants of the regions being abandoned, a significant
federal budget may act as a stabilizer (as in the United States) through
the redistribution policies that it authorizes. A European budget that represents 1.2 percent of the Community GDP cannot, however, fulfill this
function.
The concrete working of the EMU allows for too many sources of
uncertainty, particularly in the sharing of powers by central banks and
maintained national banks. This technical difficulty is doubled by the
political problem of the democratic accountability of the European
Central Bank. The question of monetary sovereignty thus re-emerges. The
debate centered first of all on the importance to be given to the notion
of subsidiarity. Jean-Pierre Patat, in sketching out several options for the
sharing of powers between national banks that are members of the ESCB
and the European Central Bank, has shown the potential opportunities

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and risks inherent in the discourse of subsidiarity. According to Patat,

nothing prohibits
the limiting of the ESBC to the conception and the orientations of monetary
policy: objective of growth of a European monetary aggregate, exchange of the
Euro in relation to third party currencies, levels of interest rates and of obligatory reserves compatible with the realisation of goals. The national central banks,
acting on their respective monetary markets, evaluate the liquidity of the commercial banks. . . .[T]he intervention on the exchange market could be fractionated. . . . [T]he national central banks would thus conserve a portion of their
reserves.27

Although not one devoid of efficiency, a minimalist interpretation of

monetary integration exists. But can such a state resist the tests of time?
Can the management of systematic risk or prudential risk be decentralized? Financial crises, particularly in the summer of 1998, restated the
question with renewed clarity. And can Europe continue to rely upon the
Fed as the planetary banker of last resort?
With regard to the democratic accountability of the European Central
Bank, two separate conceptions come face to face. For some, the centrality of monetary policy in the economic regulation of the whole implies
that the central bankers should be obliged to account for, justify, and defend their policy decisions. The model that best integrates these demands
is that of the Fed. This bank has, in effect, a standard of decision making
that follows the level of activity and employment and not only the level of
inflation. It is regularly audited by Congress, and it publishes, after only a
slight delay, the transcripts of its debates in their entirety. For others, the
stability of the currency, the cardinal objective of any virtuous monetary
policy, implies clear objectives, indicators that are stable in their definition, and the removal of central bank decisions from all public debate.
The model that best reflects this orientation is that of the Bundesbank.
Before the Maastricht Treaty a simple law could modify the functioning
of the Bundesbank. The institutional disposition adopted in 1992 constitutionalizes the independence of the central bank, limiting its democratic
accountability to a report to the European Parliament. The 1992 outcome
also renders any contradictory debate on monetary policy difficult if not
impossible.
Ever since 1992 the debate over European political authority has necessarily been ambushed. Every entityeconomic administration, economic
pole, or economic pillarcalled upon to formulate macroeconomic
27

Patat, 956.

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285

directives and to define a policy of exchange is immediately suspect because it carries with it the risk that it might interfere with the independent central bank. At the same time, however, and in the interest of the
European Central Bank, a legitimate political authority has imposed itself. The solution was finally found with the creation of an informal group
known as Euro XI. It has neither secretariat nor defined powers. But
even this minimally defined authority is contested because it excludes
the countries which are, at present, out of the Euro (the United Kingdom,
Sweden, Denmark, and Greece). In sum, this laborious compromise hardly
differs from all of its predecessors: it is an attempt to create European
Union policies out of an irreversible process that precludes any change
without an explicit political decision.
There exist two interpretations of the EMU, just as there exists a
single market where major sources of competitive imbalance subsist. The
post-Euro Europe will be subjected to double internal and external pressure. In actual practice, the single market is going to become fully active
with the introduction of the new currency: the comparability of prices,
costs, and charges will be instantaneous. And the development of information technologies will accelerate the process. There is, therefore, no
doubt that competitive pressure will be increased and that the social and
fiscal systems will affect the localization of activities. External pressure
will manifest itself through the appreciation of the Euro in relation to
the dollar and the yen. In the long run a monetary zone like Europe with
low demographic pressure, with an aging population, whose growth rate
is weak and that has an excessive savings rate, risks seeing its currency
overvalued. In either case, apart from taking a new leap toward coordination of macroeconomic policies, the internal tensions in Europe will
increase, quickly jeopardizing the single currency. Today nobody is ready
to imagine a substantial European federal budget, coordinated employment policies, fiscal harmonization, or a strict prohibition on fiscal, social,
and regulatory dumpingin short, an advance toward a Union organization of a federative type. But European integration follows a cycle; it has
its depressions and its upswings.
Today the paradox resides in the contradiction between monetary integration (all the more necessary since the single market is a success and
commercial activity has become intense) and a monetary union (all the
more fragile since it is founded on the automatic dispositions of economic
cooperation). Following a crisis of the Euro, the most widely accepted
solution is the renewal of the march toward budgetary federalism and
political union. This demonstrates the extremely imbalanced character of

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current European construction. The European competitive crisis, the end

of acquired advantages, and globalization represent a formidable challenge. Europe can rediscover its margins of maneuver only within the
Union. A devaluation, to take an extreme example, of 50 percent of the
Euro in a totally unified Europe whose extracommunity foreign trade represents only 10 percent of the GDP would affect the revenues of European
households only slightly (by 5 percent). The simple threat of the use of the
exchange rate weapon would confer upon Europe considerable power in
determining the worlds commercial game-rules. First, however, Europe
must demonstrate that it possesses the will to operate in this wayfar
from likely at present.
Monetary union arrived on time in 1999 as Kohl and Mitterand had
hoped. The price paid in terms of loss of growth and employment has
ended up intimidating speculators and financial markets. In sum, the EMU
is the coproduct of a cartel of national monetary bureaucracies and political authorities in step with the acceleration of the march of history in the
East. The French and the Germans played a decisive role. The objectives
of the experts, shared by the governments of the time, were to inscribe
competitive deflation in the institutional workings of the state in order to
shelter it from partisan political influence.28 The independent central bank
is the living proof of the success of this strategy. The war in Kosovo might
have the same effect upon Europes military future as German unification
has had upon its monetary one. This has been the way that Europe has
always progressed: by means of lengthy and obscure technical negotiations, on the one hand, and sudden political accelerations the moment
that History takes over, on the other.
28

A decisive advance in the realization of monetary union occurred in Verona in April 1996.
A highly political affair such as the exterior value of a currency in the heart of the Europe
of the Fifteen was placed on the road to final technicalization. In the initial conception
of the EMU, the Eurofed determined monetary policy; its power was supposed to be
balanced by that of the European economic government, which reserved the privilege
of setting the exterior value of the Euro and the parities with nonadmitted European
currencies. In Verona, Eurofeds power to call a ministerial meeting (so as to proceed
with the monetary alignments made necessary by the divergences between the Euro,
hard-core currency, and currencies of the periphery) was recognized.

13
Identity Politics and European Integration:
The Case of Germany
THOMAS RISSE AND
DANIELA ENGELMANN-MARTIN

We do not want a German Europe, but a European Germany. This famous quote by the novelist Thomas Mann from the interwar period has
remained the mantra of the German political elites ever since the catastrophe of World War II.1 To be a good German means nowadays to be a
good European and to wholeheartedly support European integration.
To be a good European German also means to have finally overcome
the countrys militarist and nationalist past and to have learned the right
lessons from history.
The political elites of the Federal Republic of Germany have thoroughly
Europeanized the German national identity since the 1950s. This Europeanization of German collective identity explains to a large degree why
all German governments since Konrad Adenauer was chancellor have
embraced European integrationfrom the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to
the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. Since the late 1950s, there has been an
elite consensus in support of European integration based on a federalist
modelthe United States of Europe. This federalist consensus has remained quite stable despite drastic changes in Germanys power status in
Europe and the world. It is strongly linked to the Europeanized national
identity, and it accounts for continued German support for European integration, even though the end of the Cold War and German unification
should have challenged that elite consensus. After all, Germany was now
free to choose its foreign policy orientation for the first time since 1945.
Instead, the country opted for continuity.
1

This chapter presents findings from a multiyear research project funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association): Ideas, Institutions, and Political Culture: The Europeanization of National Identities in Cross-National Comparison.
For research assistance on theoretical concepts concerning national identity, we thank
Martin Marcussen. For critical comments, we thank Anthony Pagden.

287

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Identity politics not only explains the stubborn support for European
integration by all German governments from Adenauers to Gerhard
Schroders. It also operates as a mechanism for silencing political controversies: the more that previously domestic issues become Europeanized,
the less obviously contentious they become. The European Economic and
Monetary Union (EMU) and the single currency are cases in point. Identity politics largely accounts for the absence of any serious political debate
about the pros and cons of the Euro by the country that is among the most
affected by giving up its cherished Deutsche Mark. Elite politicians, particularly former opposition leaders of the German Social Democratic Party
(SPD), were effectively silenced, since objections to the Euro were seen as
opposition to European integration in general and, therefore, as inconsistent with German European identity. As a result, German political elites
never took advantage of the strong public majority against renouncing
the Deutsche Mark.2
But German Europeanness is still German Europeanness. It comes, as
do all collective understandings of Europe, in national colors. We do not
want to suggest that Germany has somehow supranationalized and surrendered its identity as a nation-state. German discourses on Europe
and what it means contain distinctive features relating to particular understandings of German history and culture. In other words, German
Europeanness is different from, say, French Europeanness, particularly
since German understandings of the nation and the state embody different concepts and meanings than French understandings of letat nation.
In this chapter we shall proceed in three stages. First, we will try to clarify the concept of national collective identity and to elucidate what identity politics can and cannot explain. Second, we will provide an overview
of the evolution of German elite identities related to Europe since 1945.
Third, we will discuss the question of how, and under what conditions,
identity politics matters with regard to the arguments preceding the introduction of the EMU and the Euro.
The chapter is concerned with the level of political elites. Its empirical
domain are discourses and controversies between and among the major
German political parties. Identity politics is always about the interaction
of elites and masses. But it is empirically and methodologically beyond
our scope to analyze the effects of elite identity constructions on mass
public opinion. It is equally impossible here to investigate how popular
2

See Eurobarometer survey, OctoberNovember 1996, quoted in The Economist, June 7,

1997, 25.

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289

identities have affected the collective identities of political elites. Rather,

we will speculate about these questions in the conclusion.

WHAT IS NATION-STATE IDENTITY AND

WHAT CAN IT EXPLAIN?

Before proceeding with the empirical argument, we must address three

conceptual questions: What are collective identities, and how do we know
them when we see them? Why do some ideas prevail over others in
identity-related discourses? And finally, which causal mechanisms link
collective identities to the behavior of actors?3
The literature on nation-building, nationalism, and national identity
these terms are sometimes used interchangeablycan be roughly categorized as follows. While almost everybody agrees by now that nations and national identities are social constructions, few agree on what
this means in terms of malleability, on the one hand, and instrumental use for political purposes by elites, on the other. Concerning malleability, some authors use the notion of national identity in an almost primordial sense. Anthony Smith, for example, defines a nation
as a named human population sharing a historic territory, common
myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy, and common legal rights and duties for all members.4 He then
argues that the community of myths and common memories on which
nations are built requires something of an ethnic core based on myths
of common ancestry, shared historical memories, elements of a common culture, and so on. These myths of the past are difficult to escape
from, and the collective understandings on which they are based are almost frozen in time. Nationalist groups might rediscover and reinterpret
them, but fundamental changes in collective national identities are almost
excluded.5 Smith is rather pessimistic concerning a collective European
identity, since Europe as a nation lacks an ethnic core. From this perspective, not much in terms of Europeanization of collective identities can be
expected.
3

4
5

For the following, see also Martin Marcussen, Thomas Risse, Daniela EngelmannMartin, Hans-Joachim Knopf, and Klaus Roscher, Constructing Europe: The Evolution
of French, British, and German Nation-State Identities, Journal of European Public
Policy 6, 4 (1999): 61433.
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 1314.
See also Anthony D. Smith, Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the
Reconstruction of Nations, Nations and Nationalism 1, 1 (1995): 323.

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At the other end of the spectrum are postmodernist arguments about

collective identity constructions.6 Identities are not much more than subject positions in political discourses. National identities are almost constantly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed; change rather than
continuity or constraint prevails. The hub of post-modern life strategy is
not identity building, but avoidance of fixation. The overall result is fragmentation of time into episodes, each one cut from its past and from its
future, each one self-enclosed and self-contained.7 If national identities
are understood in this way, the term loses its usefulness as an analytical
category, and theorizing about a Europeanization of national identities
becomes almost impossible.
In between these two extremes there is considerable room for conceptualizations of national identities that would seem to be more useful.
Again, two broad approaches can be taken: one emphasizing the instrumentality of identity constructions in modern nation-building processes,
the other focusing more on psychological and social needs for coherent
systems of meanings. As to the first approach, authors such as Benedict
Anderson and Ernest Gellner firmly locate the process of nation-building,
including collective identity formation, in the transition from agrarian societies to modern state-building and to modernity in general.8 One could
interpret their work as a social constructivist reinterpretation of Karl W.
Deutschs earlier work on nation-building processes.9 As Ernst Haas argues, nationalism and its inherent identity-building can be regarded as
instrumental social constructions necessary to create the imagined community of a nation-state. He identifies this process with rationalization
and modernization in a Weberian sense.10
If we apply this logic to the Europeanization of national identities, we
would expect an elite-driven deliberate process of European identity construction to exist alongside European integration. The strong version of
this argument holds that the more European integration leads to the emergence of a Euro-polity, the more nationally constructed identities would
6
7
8

10

Iver B. Neumann, Self and Other in International Relations, European Journal of

International Relations 2, 2 (1996): 13974.
Zygmunt Bauman, From Pilgrim to Touristor a Short History of Identity, in Stuart
Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 2534.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1953); Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1957).
Ernst B. Haas, Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress, vol. 1: The Rise and Decline of
Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Identity Politics and European Integration

291

converge in a collective European identity with a common core of myths,

historical memories, and visions about European order, at least among
the political elites. A weak version of the same argument holds that those
elites who support and actively promote European integration in line with
the federalist model are also the ones most actively engaged in a deliberate attempt to construct a recognizable European identity. The degree
of Europeanization of collective identities would thus be determined by
support for and opposition to further integration.
A rather different picture emerges if one uses social psychology and
sociological institutionalism to theorize about collective identity formation. This conceptualization focuses on the needs of social groups to give
meaning to their collective selves. Social identity theory (SIT) as well as
self-categorization theories provide a good starting point for clarifying
the concept of collective identity.11 Social identities contain, first, ideas
describing and categorizing an individuals membership in a social group
including emotional and evaluative components. In other words, groups
of individuals perceive that they have something in common on the basis
of which they form an imagined community.
Second, this commonness is accentuated by a sense of difference with
regard to other communities. We always need them to distinguish
ourselves and our collective identity from the others. Individuals frequently tend to view the group with which they identify in a more positive
way than they do the out-group. This does not mean, however, that the
perceived differences between the in-group and the out-group are
necessarily based on value judgments and that the other is usually
looked down at.
Third, individuals hold multiple social identities, and these social identities are context-bound. A group of Europeans might perceive themselves
as fellow Europeans when dealing with Americans yet emphasize national
differences when interacting mainly with each other. Moreover, only some
national identity constructions are consensual; others are frequently contested. The context-boundedness of national identities also means that
different components of national identities are invoked depending on the
policy area in question. National identities with regard to citizenship rules
might look different from national identities concerning understandings
11

Dominic Abrams and Michael A. Hogg, eds., Social Identity Theory (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1990); Penelope J. Oakes, S. Alexander Haslam, and John C. Turner, Stereotyping and Social Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); John C. Turner,
Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987).

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of the state and political order. Because this chapter is concerned with
the latter rather than with the former, we will use the term nation-state
identity to delineate the differences from other components of national
collective identities.
Fourth, nation-state identities are social identities defining social groups
on the basis of mostly territorial criteria. In modern times they construct
the imagined communities of nation-states and are closely linked to
ideas about sovereignty and statehood. As a result, nation-state identities
often contain visions of just political and social orders. In the case of identity constructions related to Europe, federalist visions of a United States
of Europe, of an intergovernmental confederation of nation-states, or
ideas about functional market integration are examples of such concepts
of political order.
Fifth, self-categorization theory argues that self/other categorizations
change the more gradually the more they are incorporated in institutions,
myths, and symbols, as well as in cultural understandings.12 This would
be particularly relevant for national collective identities that usually take
considerable time and effort to construct and are then embedded in institutions and a countrys political culture. Thus, one should assume that
national collective identities are generally very compelling and subject to
change only gradually.
Social psychology helps to clarify the concept of collective nation-state
identity. But it is less helpful concerning the conditions under which incremental change in nation-state identities can be expected. How and
under what conditions are principled ideas and identity-related concepts
about Europe and European order selected, incorporated, and frozen
in collective nation-state identities?
Two factors account for the selection of particular ideas and their incorporation in collective nation-state identities. First, instrumental and
power-related interests can determine the selection of ideas. Political elites
who are in the business of identity construction and manipulation can
select specific ideas about European order and even try to Europeanize
nationally defined identities, because it suits their instrumentally defined
interests to do so. Thus, we do not claim an identity versus interest
account that would serve only to reify both. Political elites legitimately
pursue instrumentally defined interests; they want to remain and gain
political power, for example. The more significant question is how
12

Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: Random House, 1984);
Oakes, Haslam, and Turner, Stereotyping.

Identity Politics and European Integration

293

nation-state identities and instrumental-power identitiesinterests

interact with each other. Causality can run both ways. A change in instrumentally defined interests might well lead over time to identity changes.
Moreover, political elites are frequently in the business of identity construction for political reasons. In these cases the causal arrows run from
interests to identities. At the same time, however, nation-state identities
define how actors view their instrumental interests and which preferences
are regarded as possible, legitimate, and appropriate for enacting given
identities. Moreover, instrumentally defined interests might change more
frequently than nation-state identities, which are expected to be deeply
compelling for the reasons outlined above.
Second, cultural sociology and sociological institutionalism expect variation rather than convergence concerning the potential Europeanization
of nation-state identities.13 The idea behind this argument is that identity constructions with regard to Europe and the European order are assumed to interact with given nation-state identities. Political visions and
identity constructions about Europe and European order influence and
are incorporated in collective nation-state identities, the more they resonate with national political cultures, with national political institutions
and the ideas about political order embedded in them. Timing as well
as substance is involved. Some nation-state identities might incorporate
Europe more easily than others and, thus, might change earlier. Moreover, the very content of a European collective identity might vary. The
outcome depends on how ideas about Europe resonate with nationally
constructed identities.
One would then expect in different national contexts different interpretations of European and varied definitions of Europes others. Political institutions and cultures as intervening factors between ideas about
Europe and national collective identities perform two tasks. First, they
incorporate specific understandings of nation-state identities that make
them resistant to change. Second, they influence actors in their efforts to
change identity constructions by distributing both ideational and material resources. Not every political actor has an equal chance to challenge
the prevailing nation-state identities. Because institutions are expressions
of certain beliefs and nation-state identities, we expect institutions to demarcate the range of beliefs and nation-state identities an individual exposed to these institutions can affirm. Institutions, therefore, help the
13

Ronald L. Jepperson and Anne Swidler, What Properties of Culture Should We Measure? Poetics 22 (1994): 35971; M. Rainer Lepsius, Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990).

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party-political elites to construct and reconstruct nation-state identities

in specific ways.
Finally, a note of caution has to be introduced concerning what the concept of collective identity can actually explain. Since national identities
are broad social constructs, they can shape actors interests and preferences but not necessarily their particular behaviors. Collective identities
might account for the overall goals of actors, while the actual choices of
strategies to reach these goals might be influenced by exogenous factors
such as perceptions of the situation and of other actors likely strategies.
In other words, national identity constructions might explain the general
orientation of German political elites toward Europe and European integration. But one should be careful about using the concept of identity to
account for specific policy decisions.
GERMANY AND THE EVOLUTION OF A EUROPEAN
NATION-STATE IDENTITY

The German case is one of thorough and profound reconstruction of a

nation-state identity following the catastrophe of World War II. Thomas
Manns dictum about a European Germany quickly became the dominant tune of the postwar (West) German political elites.14 Since the 1950s
a fundamental consensus has emerged among the political elites, a consensus generally shared by the mass public, that European integration is
in Germanys vital interest. Simon Bulmer calls it the Europeanization
of German politics.15

Konrad Adenauers Vision of Germany in Europe

The multilateralization of German foreign policy was initiated by Chancellor Adenauer. He regarded the integration of the German state and
society in the West as the best means of overcoming Germanys past.
Adenauer was a convinced Europeanist who had been active in the
14

15

We use the term Germany routinely for the Federal Republic including the preunification period. For further details on the following, see Daniela Engelmann-Martin,
im deutschen Parteiendiskurs in der Weimarer Republik sowie nach
Nationale Identitat
dem II. Weltkrieg (1. Untersuchungszeitraum), manuscript (Florence: European University Institute, 1998).
Simon Bulmer, The Changing Agenda of West German Public Policy (Aldershot:
Dartmouth, 1989). See also Gunther Hellmann, Goodbye Bismarck? The Foreign Policy of Contemporary Germany, Mershon Review of International Studies 40, 1 (1996):
139; Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Tamed Power: Germany in Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1997).

Identity Politics and European Integration

295

pro-European wing of the Zentrum, the Catholic predecessor party of

the German Christian Democrats (CDU), during the Weimar Republic.16
Adenauers thinking about Europe was heavily influenced by ideas and
visions of the interwar period. The Rhinelandish Zentrum mixed Europeanism and Catholicism with a distinct anti-Prussian connotation. Some
went so far as to suggest the creation of a Rhinelandish state within the
German Reich that would be associated with France and thus constitute
the origins of a larger European order. This vision of Europe was related to
identity constructions around the concept of a Christian (that is, Catholic)
Occident; the Slavic and Islamic Orient constituted the other.17 After
1945 the Soviet Union and communism easily replaced religiously oriented perceptions of the other.
Adenauers visions and identity-related ideas about Europe also originated from the transnational European movement, in particular the
Paneuropean Union founded by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.18
As early as 1923 Coudenhove-Kalergi argued for the creation of a United
States of Europe (which would, however, exclude the United Kingdom).
His ideas were less concerned with religion than with power politics, in
particular the status of Western Europe among the other great powers.
These ideas survived Hitler and the Nazis and prevailed within the Christian opposition movement to Hitler.19
After 1945 the newly founded Christian Democratic Party (CDU) immediately embraced European unification as the alternative to the nationalism of the past. As Ernst Haas put it, in leading circles of the
CDU, the triptych of self-conscious anti-Nazism, Christian values, and
dedication to European unity as a means of redemption for past German
sins has played a crucial ideological role.20 The Bavarian CSU declared
Basic Program: Europe is a supranational
in 1946 in the Eichstatt
16

17

18
19

20

Arnulf Baring, Auenpolitik in Adenauers Kanzlerdemokratie. Bonns Beitrag zur

Europaischen
Verteidigungsgemeinschaft (Munchen-Wien:
Oldenbourg, 1969); HansPeter Schwarz, Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik. Deutschland im Widerstreit der
auenpolitischen Konzeptionen in den Jahren der Besatzungsherrschaft 1945 bis 1949
(Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1966).

Jurgen
Bellers, Sozialdemokratie und Konservatismus im Angesicht der Zukunft

Europas, in Jurgen
Bellers and Mechthild Winking, eds., Europapolitik der Parteien.
Konservatismus, Liberalismus und Sozialdemokratie im Ringen um die Zukunft Europas
(Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1991), 342.
Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa (1923; reprinted, Wien: Pan-Europa
Verlag, 1982).
Rudolf Morsey, Vorstellungen Christlicher Demokraten innerhalb und ausserhalb des

Dritten Reiches uber

den Neuaufbau Deutschlands und Europas, in Winfried Becker
and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Christliche Demokratie in Europa. Grundlagen und Entwick
lungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Koln:
Boehlau, 1988), 189212.
Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 195057
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 127.

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community of life among the family of nations. We support the creation

of a European confederation for the common preservation and continuation of the Christian Occidental culture. Christianity, democracy,
and (later on) social market economy became the three pillars on which a
collective European identity was to be based. It was sharply distinguished
from the German nationalist and militarist past and from Soviet communism and Marxism, particularly during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In other words, Germanys own past as well as communism constituted the others in this Christian Occidental (Abendland) identity
construction.
When Chancellor Adenauer came into power in 1949, he built upon
and expanded these identity constructions. His construction of Abendland, which included the Anglo-Saxon community, was synonymous with
the West, the free world, which he saw threatened by Asia.21 This
notion of Abendland versus Soviet communism also contained the construction of a central position in Europe (Mittellage) with the corresponding commitment to the West. From the Christian Democratic perspective,
Germany in the heart of Europe was positioned between two power
blocs with antagonistic ideologies. In order to avoid being crushed between the two blocs, the Federal Republic had to choose a side. This
concept of Abendland left no choice other than to reject any status of
neutrality and to commit oneself to the free world.
The Christian Democratic identity constructionthe politicization of
Christian Occidental culture in contrast to the countrys Nazi past and
the Soviet threatdetermined a new role for Germany in a European
federal state: Germany in Europe was regarded as the future mission
for the Federal Republic. Adenauer considered firmly anchoring postwar
Germany in Western Europe as the best way to overcome another German
Sonderweg. In his view West German neutrality during the Cold War was
not an option, not even in exchange for reunification with East Germany.
Security for Western Germany was more important than reunification,
and Adenauer was convinced that this could be achieved only by anchoring the Federal Republic in the West. Interests and identity coincided, since
Adenauer used his firm belief in Western institutions to regain national
sovereignty for West Germany.22
21

22

See, for example, Adenauers opening speech at the Second Party Convention of the
EuCDU in the British Zone in Recklinghausen, August 289, 1948, Eine Hoffnung fur
ropa, in Hans-Peter Schwarz, ed., Konrad Adenauer. Reden 19171967. Eine Auswahl
(Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1975), 124ff.
Baring, Auenpolitik, 57; Bellers, Sozialdemokratie, Konservatismus, 278.

Identity Politics and European Integration

297

Lack of Consensus among German Elites

But throughout the early 1950s, there was no consensus among elites
on German foreign policy orientations. The main controversies at the
time centered around the issue of whether German rearmament within
NATO and German participation in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) might hamper prospects for early reunification with Eastern
Germany. Within Adenauers own party, Jakob Kaiser, the CDU leader
in Berlin and later chairman of the German trade unions, favored a neutral policy of bridge-building between East and West. We need, he
said, to be a bridge between East and West, for Germanys and Europes
sake.23 Similar concepts prevailed in Adenauers coalition partner, the
Free Democratic Party (FDP).24 Thomas Dehler, the chairman of the party
during the late 1950s, prioritized reunification over European integration. Moreover, he favored a Gaullist vision of European orderthat is, a
Europe of nation-states. As a result, the FDP rejected the Treaty of Rome,
even though it had supported the ECSC and the European Defense Community (EDC) during the early 1950s.
The opposition to Adenauers policies during the 1950s within his
own party and within the Free Democratic Party was, however, largely
insignificant. As a master of power politics, he managed effectively to silence any opposition to his foreign policy within his coalition government
through a combination of sticks and carrots. His authoritarian leadership style established the primacy of the German Chancellery early on
in the history of the Federal Republics political institutions. Moreover,
Adenauer was able to buy off domestic opposition to his foreign policy in exchange for concessions in important economic and social policy
areas.
Adenauers foreign policy proved to be highly successful. By 1955 the
Federal Republic had essentially regained its national sovereignty and
had reestablished itself among the Western democracies. It joined NATO
and other Western institutions and was among the founding and leading members of the European integration process. Thus, Adenauer had
created conditions by his foreign policy that were hard to oppose. At
the same time he was actively involved in the construction of a postwar nation-state identity that distanced itself from the past by embracing
23
24

Jakob Kaiser, quoted in Frank Pfetsch, Die Auenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

19491992: Von der Spaltung zur Wiedervereinigung (Munchen:

UTB, 1993), 139.
Adenauer (BadenSebastian J. Glatzeder, Die Deutschlandpolitik der FDP in der Ara
Baden: Nomos, 1980).

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Europe. Adenauers Europe ended at the Iron Curtain, which he constructed rhetorically as the borderline between good and evil. Europe
meant civilization, Christianity, democracy, and the market economyin
sharp contrast to the East as well as to Germanys own past.
The Social Democrats (SPD) were the main opposition party to
Adenauers policies. In its 1925 Heidelberg program, the SPD embraced
the concept of a United States of Europe and became the first major
German party to do so. When the party was forced into exile during the
Nazi period, the leadership fully endorsed the notion of a democratic
European federation. As in the case of the CDU, the European idea
was primarily invoked as a spiritual value in the first years of the emigration. What Europe would be like after Hitler was a second-order question,
though it was taken as self-evident that it would be socialist. In this period
Europe was seen as an antithesis to Nazi Germany.25 As Erich Matthias
put it in 1952: For the Social Democrats, there is no Germany without Europe, it is always Germany and Europe, Germany with Europe,
Germany in Europe.26 The Social Democrats constructed a connection
between Germany and Europe. After the war they considered it their task
to lead Germany back to Europe.
In short, the Europeanization of German nation-state identity originated in the resistance of exiled political leaderswithin both SPD and
CDUto Hitler and the Nazis. For them Europes other was Nazi
Germany. Europe symbolized the values of democracy, human rights,
and social justice, values that had to be preserved against the Nazis. This
particular identity construction then became dominant in the postWorld
War II Federal Republic.
From these historical memories the Social Democrats drew different
conclusions than did the Christian Democrats. Conscious of not being
responsible for the catastrophe of the Third Reich and convinced that the
bourgeois parties had failed and were not up to the confrontation with
communism, the SPD claimed to have a right to leadership and considered
it self-evident that Germany and Europe would become socialist. When
the SPD was refounded in 1946, its first program supported the United
States of Europe, a democratic and socialist federation of European states.
25

26

William E. Paterson, The SPD and European Integration (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1974), 3. See also Bellers, Sozialdemokratie; Rudolf Hrbek, Die SPD

Deutschland und Europa. Die Haltung der Sozialdemokratie zum Verhaltnis

von
Deutschland-Politik und Westintegration, 19451957 (Bonn: Europa Union Verlag,
1972).
Matthiass emphasis. Erich Matthias, Sozialdemokratie und Nation (Stuttgart: Deutsche
VerlagsAnstalt, 1952), 206. For the following, see ibid., 186.

Identity Politics and European Integration

299

[The German Social Democracy] desires a socialist Germany in a socialist

Europe.27 In other words, Europe, Germany, democracy, and socialism
were conceived of as identical at the time.
It turned out, however, that postwar Germany was a divided country,
and socialism did not become the guiding principle of European integration. As a result, the SPD needed to prioritize its goals. Kurt Schumacher,
the SPDs leader and a survivor of Buchenwald, argued vigorously against
the politics of Western integration, since it foreclosed the prospects of
rapid reunification of the two Germanies. During the early 1950s, the
SPD led the opposition against Adenauers policies of integrating the Federal Republic with the West. For Schumacher, reunification became the
priority. To integrate Germany into a European community required a
united Germany first. Any other order seemed unthinkable: German
unity stands for European unity. A torn Germany would only lead to a
non-unified Europe.28
At the same time Schumacher denounced the Council of Europe and
the ECCS as un-European, as minimal Europe (Kleinsteuropa), as
conservative-clericalist and capitalist. The SPD, however, went to great
pains to argue that it did not oppose European integration as such, just
this particular version. Of course, the Social Democrats also opposed
German rearmament in the context of the EDC and, later, of NATO.
Their motives were not pacifist, but they emphasized reunification over
German integration in Western institutions.
Two electoral defeats later (1953 and 1957), and the SPD slowly changed
course. There had always been internal opposition to Schumachers policies. Carlo Schmid, Ernst Reuter (the legendary mayor of Berlin), Willy
Brandt (who later became party chairman and, in 1969, chancellor),
Wilhelm Kaisen, Fritz Erler, Herbert Wehner, Helmut Schmidt (Brandts
successor as chancellor in 1974), and others always supported closer
relations to the United States as well as German integration with the
West. These Social Democrats were strongly influenced by the Socialist
Movement for the United States of Europe founded in 1947 and by Jean
Monnets Action Committee. By the late 1950s, they had gradually taken
over the party leadership.
The German Social Democrats then thoroughly reformed their domestic and foreign policy programs. Concerning the domestic realm, they
came to accept the German model of welfare state capitalism, the social
27
28

Political guidelines adopted at the Hannover Party Convention, May 1946.

Schumachers speech in Berlin, June 20, 1946, cited in Hrbek, Die SPD, Deutschland
und Europa, 37.

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market economy. With regard to foreign policy, they revisited the 1925
Heidelberg program and became staunch supporters of European integration. The changes culminated in the 1959 Godesberg program. Two years
earlier the SPD had reversed its course regarding European integration:
it supported the Treaty of Rome in the German parliament. The SPDs
return to Europe went hand in hand with a complete reversal of its
attitude toward the economic and social order of the Federal Republic.
The SPD essentially gave up socialist principles.
A Federalist Consensus Emerges
In sum, from the late 1950s on, a federalist consensus (United States of
Europe) prevailed among the German political elites from the centerright to the center-left. Germanys nation-state identity embraced a modern Europe as part of the Western community, based on liberal democracy and a social market economy, with Europes other being both
Germanys past and communism. This consensus outlasted the changes
in government from the CDU to the SPD in 1969 as well as the return of
a CDU-led government in 1982. It also survived a major foreign policy
change of West German policy toward Eastern Europe, East Germany, and
the Soviet Union. When Chancellor Willy Brandt introduced Ostpolitik
in 1969, he made it very clear that efforts at European integration were
to be untouchable and had to be continued.29 As we explain later,
German unification twenty years later did not result in a reconsideration
of German European policies.
The German European consensus, prompted by SPD election defeats,
has remained stable despite the recent politicization of European politics.
The federalist consensus has long outlasted the instrumental interests that
brought it about in the first place. As mentioned earlier, it went hand in
hand with a peculiar identity construction in the aftermath of World War
II. Support for European integration among Germanys political elites is
linked to their broad visions of the European order. It also is directly
concerned with postWorld War II German nation-state identity. Two
aspects of the concept of national identity are particularly relevant in
the German context: historical memories and the way ones own past is
understood, on the one hand, and performances and achievements, which
are claimed to serve as a model for others, on the other.
29

Wolfram F. Hanrieder, Deutschland, Europa, Amerika: Die Auenpolitik der Bundesrepublik, 19491994 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1995).

Identity Politics and European Integration

301

The German notion of what constitutes the other, the non-European,

has much to do with European and German national history. While
French nationalism has always been identified with the Enlightenment
and Republicanism, German nationalism came to be viewed as authoritarian, militaristic, and anti-Semitic. Germanys nationalist and militarist
past constitutes the other in the process of postnational identity formation whereby Europeanness replaces traditional notions of nation-state
identity. The new Germany has to be firmly anchored in the West and
in Europe.
For decades European integration was regarded by German political
elites as a sort of substitute for their own defeated, divided, and occupied country. Postwar Germany viewed itself mainly as a trading state.
Rarely did it insist on its national interest because the shaming memories of extreme nationalism rendered the language of national interest
unusable.30 Due to their problematic nation-state identity following the
Holocaust and World War II, most Germans thought the aim of European
unity so self-evident that they never really debated the pros and cons, only
the means. The German political elite considered the establishment of a
lasting European peace order as the ultimate goal of integration, Europe
thus being tantamount to superseding nationalism. There remains a stable consensus among German parties ranging from the center-right to the
center-left that the process of European unification must be irreversible.
They are convinced that a unified Europe is the most effective assurance
against the renaissance of nationalism, a relapse into power-political
rivalries, and disastrous conflicts.
The German nation-state identity has, therefore, become thoroughly
European in the sense that today a good German equals a good European supporting a united Europe. Europe in this identity construction
stands for a stable, peaceful order capable of overcoming the continents
bloody past, for democracy and human rights (in contrast to European
and Germanautocratic history), as well as for a social market economy including the welfare state (in contrast to both Soviet communism
and Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire capitalism). Europe closely resem
bles a nation-state identity based on what Jurgen
Habermas has called
constitutional patriotism.31
30
31

William E. Paterson, The German Christian Democrats, in John Gaffney, ed., Political
Parties and the European Union (London: Routledge, 1996), 65.
und Geltung. Beitrage
zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und

Jurgen
Habermas, Faktizitat
des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1992).

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German Unification: Continuity Rather than Change

The events of the period since the end of the Cold War, the collapse of
East Germany, and German unification in 1990 underscore our argument. With the unexpected end of the East-West conflict and regained
German sovereignty, a broad range of foreign policy opportunities suddenly emerged. The German elites could have redefined their national
interests. Instead, not much happened. Germany did not reconsider its
fundamental foreign policy orientations, since Germanys commitment to
European integration had long outlived the context in which it had originally emerged.32 While the end of the Cold War and German unification
certainly represented a critical juncture in German domestic politics, there
was no fundamental debate about the countrys foreign policy orientation, including European politics. External shocks represent critical junctures challenging given collective identities only when they are perceived
as such. However, Germany was among the winners of the East-West
conflict; policies toward European integration were widely considered as
highly successful. So why change course?
Even though reunification apparently had no effect on West German
identity constructions, one would probably expect East German elites to
hold different views on European integration. Did their differing identity
constructions not have an effect on previously Europeanized identities?
In fact, if one looks at the utterances of East German political elites concerning Europe in the media as well as at party conventions, their views
do not seem to present a major challenge to the previously consensual
identities.
One potential challenge to the dominant identity constructions comes
from the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the former
Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the GDR. The PDS is critical of the course of
Germanys foreign policy in general as well as the way European policies
are being conducted by the major parties. Even though the PDS claims to
be the Socialist party of the Federal Republic, and not just of a certain
region or a social class, the party defines itself as the representative for
East Germans. The PDS raises its voice against any social, legal or other
disadvantages facing former citizens of the GDR.33 With its rejection of
the current economic system, its aim for a socialist society, and its demand
32
33

Hellmann, Goodbye Bismarck?; Katzenstein, Tamed Power.

Mit ostdeutscher Kompetenz gegen den Euro, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April
23, 1997; Bisky: PDS ist eine linke Massenpartei. Brie: Widerstand gegen Rachepolitik,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March, 14, 1994.

Identity Politics and European Integration

303

for the dissolution of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

and the Western European Union (WEU), the party positions itself in
opposition to the mainstream political consensus, representing the only
real alternative, the only persistent opposition party.34 Accordingly,
the PDS was the only party to vote against the treaties of Maastricht
and Amsterdam in the German Parliament and to reject the Euro for its
monetarist logic: it opposes a common currency as long as it is not
linked to an increase in the level of employment and to certain social and
ecological standards.35
Interestingly, the PDS is not opposed to Europe or European integration as such, just to this particular version. The PDS as a European
Socialist party therefore says Yes to European integration and ultimately even to a common currency, but this consent is linked to fundamental criticism of the European Union in its current state. The party wants
a change of policy regarding the EU: Contrary to nationalist forces, for
the PDS, the alternatives to the European Union and the Euro are not
German hegemony and Deutsche Mark.36 The PDS regards the EMU as
a capitalist money union and rejects a Europe of the Banks, but it
also does not want to be identified with Deutsche Mark nationalism.37
Although the PDS now regularly gains over 20 percent of the votes in

Lander
elections in East Germany, it only marginally passed the 5 percent hurdle during the last federal elections. The differing view of the
East German political elite organized in the PDS does not represent a
serious challenge to the mainstream identity constructions. East German
Christian Democrats or Social Democrats do not challenge the dominant
European identity constructions either. First, East German political elites
seem to play only a minor role in this discourse since issues relating to
Europe are far less visible than those relating to German unification.38
34

35
36
37
38

die neuen Lander

Bundesparteitag der PDS in Rostock. Vetorecht fur

gefordert,

eine
Suddeutsche
Zeitung, April, 6, 1998; Wahlprogramm der Linken Liste/PDS. Fur
starke linke Opposition, Neues Deutschland, September 27, 1990; PDS-Parteitag in

Suhl, Ziel ist erster Einzug ins Europaparlament, Suddeutsche

Zeitung, September 20,
1999.
Prozent, Die Tageszeitung, December 17, 1997.
Die PDS setzt 1998 auf funf
einen Kurswechsel in Europa, 12.
PDS, Alternativen 99: Europawahlprogramm. Fur

Parteivorstand PDS, ed., Europaische

Union und linke Politik, Hefte zur politischen
Bildung, Berlin, September 1998, 301.
Especially East German members of the European Parliament often complain about

this indifference. See Als Zaungaste

nach Europa abgeordnet. Die Erfahrungen der

Ost-Beobachter, einer wirklich einmaligen Gruppierung, in Brussel

und Straburg,
ja auch dazu. Von
Frankfurter Rundschau, September 24, 1993; Rudolfstadt gehort

einem Thuringer
Parlamentarier in Straburg, der auszog, den Ostdeutschen das Furchten

vor Europa zu nehmen, Suddeutsche

Zeitung, December, 6, 1995.

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East German concerns and issues related to German unity are the main
topics that East German politicians usually address, and they have a higher
priority and tend to supersede everything else. Statements by East German
politicians on Europe in the media, just like their contributions to party
conventions, are quite rare. Most East German policymakers appear to
overlook, at least in their public statements, that the European Union
through its structural funds and its regulatory policies regarding state
subsidiesplayed a major role in the German unification process.
Second, the few East Germans who do speak out on Europe, usually
members of the European Parliament or rather prominent politicians,
seem wholeheartedly to embrace former West German identity constructions with regard to Europe.39 Wolfgang Thierse, leader of the Eastern
SPD at the time and now speaker of the German Parliament, declared
in 1990: Our commitment to European integration, our commitment
to the creation of the United States of Europe, is not merely rhetorical,
but for us it symbolizes a chance for lasting stability, security and partnership in Europe.40 Europe and European integration are almost
always referred to in connection with German reunification: Europe is
our chance. . . . There is an indivisible link for us between German and
European unification.41
However, East German political elites slightly differ from their West
German counterparts, since they bring a stronger Eastern European perspective to the political discourse. They are usually firm advocates of
rapid Eastern enlargement of the European Union. In view of the external
frontiers of the European Union, Eastern Europe is far closer to Eastern
party members who find themselves acting as a kind of trustee for Eastern Europe and bearing a special responsibility for shaping the future
relationship to Eastern European countries.42 CDU politician Lothar De
Maizi`ere reminded his party that security and stability in Europe include
39

40
41

42

Rolf Berend, a member of the European Parliament, who cited Adenauer, at the Party

Convention of the CDU in Dusseldorf

1992, proceedings, 208; Brandenburgmitten
in Europa, in SPD Brandenburg, Landtagswahlprogramm: Es geht um Brandenburg,
1999, 92ff.
Wolfgang Thierses speech at the Party Convention of the SPD in Berlin, September 27
28, 1990, proceedings, 43.

Contribution of Klaus Zeh at the CDU Party Convention in Dusseldorf,

October 2628,
1992, proceedings, 208; see also opening words of Markus Merkel, deputy spokesman
of the GDRs Social Democrats at the Party Convention of the SPD in Berlin, December

1820, 1989, proceedings, 93; Wieder eine Bruckenfunktion,

Frankfurter Rundschau,
September 24, 1993.
Brandenburgmitten in Europa, 92. The first quote is from Wieder eine

Bruckenfunktion.
See also Merkel, proceedings of SPD Party Convention 1989, 92

October
94; Reinhard Schulze at the 3rd Party Convention of the CDU in Dusseldorf,
2628, 1992, 190; Thierse, SPD Convention speech 1990, 43.

Identity Politics and European Integration

305

the Soviet Union: The vision of a common European house approaches

its realization. A European consciousness supersedes the old division and
a greater Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals again takes shape.43
In sum, the European identity constructions of the major parties have
not been susceptible to change through the accession of the East German
political elites. Even after unification and with more sovereignty to sacrifice for the European cause, the majority of the German political elite
continued to share Chancellor Kohls belief that only deeper political and
economic union could anchor Germany firmly in the West and strengthen
European institutions to ensure peace in the years ahead.44 In the aftermath of unification, the German government accelerated rather than
slowed down its support for progress in European integration. It has been
argued that German initiatives for the treaty on European Union and for
the EMU were part of a quid pro quo for French support for unification.45
This is only partly correct. It is true that Chancellor Kohl proposed the
treaty on political union in order to reassure his nervous neighbors that
there would be no change in German Europeanness after unification. But
given the federalist elite consensus, this was not a great sacrifice and was
not even considered as such in German political discourse. As to the
EMU, German support for monetary union was long on record before
1990, provided that the European Central Bank was autonomous and
that convergence criteria would be met.46 In other words, German support for a single currency and for a European political union was perfectly
in line with long-standing attitudes toward integration and the countrys
European nation-state identity. It cannot simply be explained by instrumental reasons. The case of the single currency that required Germany
to give up its cherished Deutsche Mark supports this argument. It also
illustrates how identity politics explains specific orientations in German
policies toward Europe.

43

44
45

46

Speech by the leader of the GDRs Christian Democrats, Prime Minister Lothar de
Maizi`ere, at the Party Convention of the CDU in Hamburg, October 12, 1990, proceedings, 43.
Thomas Banchoff, German Identity and European Integration, European Journal of
International Relations 5, 3 (1999): 25989.
Joseph M. Grieco, The Maastricht Treaty, Economic and Monetary Union, and the
Neo-Realist Research Programme, Review of International Studies 21, 1 (1995): 21
40; Wayne Sandholtz, Monetary Bargains: The Treaty on EMU, in Alan W. Cafruny
and Glenda G. Rosenthal, eds., The State of the European Community: The Maastricht
Debate and Beyond (Boulder Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 12542.
David R. Cameron, Transnational Relations and the Development of European Economic and Monetary Union, in Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational
Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3778.

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GERMAN EUROPEANNESS AND THE SINGLE CURRENCY:

BETWEEN THE EURO AND THE DEUTSCHE MARK

It is not at all clear why a single currency was in Germanys economic

or geopolitical interest, particularly after unification.47 First, the German
economy did not need a common currency, since the European Monetary
System (EMS) already constituted a Deutsche Mark zone. German industry conducted its European business predominantly in Deutsche Marks;
the effects of a common currency on transaction costs were, therefore,
minimal. Second, why should the Germans give up the EMS as a Deutsche
Mark zone controlled by the Bundesbank in favor of the Economic and
Monetary Union (EMU) and a supranational European Central Bank
(ECB), particularly after unification had increased German power? Third,
the economic benefits of the EMU for German business were at least unclear. One could argue that the Euro increases German competitiveness on
the global markets more than the Deutsche Mark ever couldprovided,
of course, that the Euro became as strong a currency. And even if then,
European and German competitiveness on the global markets might suffer
if a strong Euro was ever as overvalued as the Deutsche Mark had been at
times. Nobody knew in advance. This leads to a fourth point. Even with
the convergence criteria firmly enforced and the stability pact in place,
it was uncertain whether Germanys cherished economic policies of tight
money and low inflation would survive the EMU.
Finally, if the EMU and the single currency represented a binding
strategy of the lesser European states to contain German power after unification, why did Germany agree to it? Why was it that the former German
government under Chancellor Kohl remained an enthusiastic supporter of
a single currency, despite all the popular misgivings? This is not to argue
that the German political elites did not agree to self-binding. Rather,
the taming of German power through European integration had the
enthusiastic support of German elites from the center-right to the centerleft long before unification.48 The underlying rationale for this support
does not stem from quasi-objective geopolitical reasons. German acceptance of self-binding results from a particular collective construction
47

48

Parts of the following were published first in Thomas Risse, Between the Euro and the
Deutsche Mark: German Identity and the European Union (Washington, D.C.: Center
for German and European Studies, Georgetown University, 1997); and in Thomas Risse,
Daniela Engelmann-Martin, Hans-Joachim Knopf, and Klaus Roscher, To Euro or Not
to Euro? The EMU and Identity Politics in the European Union, European Journal of
International Relations 5, 2 (1999): 14787.
Katzenstein, Tamed Power.

Identity Politics and European Integration

307

of historical memory, a peculiar perception of Germanys place in Europe,

and, last but not least, visions of European order. German agreement to
the EMU and the stubbornness with which the vast majority of the political elite supported the Euro seem strange, since Germany had more
to lose from monetary union than any other country. Even more surprising was the lack of public controversy over the Euro, despite the fact
that a large section of the German public rejected giving up the cherished
Deutsche Mark until recently. The vast majority of the German political
elite never wavered in its support for the Euro, and this consensus was
only challenged by a few prominent politiciansamong them Edmund
Stoiber (CSU), the prime minister of Bavaria, on the right, and Gerhard

Schroder
(SPD) before he became chancellor in 1998 on the center-left.49
They were joined by the more implicit opposition to the Euro voiced by
the powerful German Bundesbank.50 However, each of them framed his
opposition by insisting on a strict adherence to the convergence criteria

andin the cases of Stoiber and Schroderby

an attempt to delay the
third stage of the EMU. All let it be known, however, that they were in
favor of European integration.
German elite attitudes toward the EMU must be understood in the
framework of identity politics. Policymakers, in particular Chancellor
Helmut Kohl, framed the issue of the Euro in terms of the following
equation: support for the Euro equals support for European integration
equals good Europeanness equals good Germanness equals overcoming the German militarist and nationalist past. In other words, Kohl
managed to frame the Euro question in terms of Germanys postWorld
War II nation-state identity. As a result, this equation was extremely powerful, since it forced opponents of a single currency to frame their position in interest-based rather than identity-based terms and to make sure
that they could not be regarded as bad Germansthat is, proponents
of German nationalism. At the same time, however, supporters of the
Euro needed to cope with another aspect of German postwar identity,
Deutsche Mark patriotism. This explains German government officials
rigid insistence on the strict fulfillment of the Maastricht convergence
49

50

On Stoibers position, see Es gab einmal eine europaische

Bewegung in Deutsch
land . . . das ist vorbei, Suddeutsche
Zeitung, November 2, 1993; Stoiber beharrt auf

Kritik an EWU, Suddeutsche

Zeitung, June 23, 1997; Edmund Stoiber: Defender of a

Decimal Point, Financial Times, July 7, 1997. On Gerhard Schroders

position, see for
example, Den besten Zeitpunkt suchen, Die Zeit, June 6, 1997.
On the Bundesbank position in general, see Cameron, Transnational Relations; John
B. Goodman, Monetary Sovereignty: The Politics of Central Banking in Western Europe
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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criteria (to make the Euro as strong as the Deutsche Mark). In this case,
then, the German elite consensus on European integration and the German
European nation-state identity served as powerful silencing mechanisms
that effectively foreclosed a public debate on the pros and cons of a single
currency.
Given the federalist elite consensus, the EMU was viewed as a cornerstone of European political integration. It was supported by all major
parties, despite a legitimacy crisis of a single currency in German public
opinion. Since the Euro was regarded as part and parcel of this political project, supporters strongly insisted that a delay in entering the third
stage in 1999 would endanger the successes of the European integration process up to now, as Chancellor Kohl put it.51 Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, argued even more bluntly that
any delay means in all likelihood the ultimate abandonment of the currency union project.52 The German political elite identified the Euro
with European integration. The vast majority of the German political
elite shared Chancellor Kohls belief that only deeper political and economic unionsymbolized by a single currencycould anchor Germany
firmly in the West and strengthen European institutions to ensure peace
in the years ahead. As Helmut Schmidt argued, If the Euro-currency
is not realized by January 1, 1999, it will most likely never again be
realized. . . . This would result in the worst crisis of the European integration processpossibly its end! And Germany would be isolated
exactly the opposite of the binding which all chancellors from Adenauer to
Kohl have pursued as the overarching strategic goal, in the vital German
interest!53
Chancellor Kohl wanted to be remembered as the one who pushed
through the EMU and made a closer European Union inevitable, thus
preventing a return to nationalism in Europe.54 Kohl framed the single
currency as the symbol of European integration, and he identified his political fate with the realization of the Euro. His unsuccessful candidacy
for the chancellery in 1998 was motivated primarily by his commitment
to European integration and the Euro. He labeled 1997the year of reference for the fulfillment of the convergence criteriaas the key year
51

52
53
54

Euro-Start ohne Paris fur

moglich,

Quoted from Huber halt

Suddeutsche
Zeitung,
Jahre spater.

July 7, 1997. See also Biedenkopf: Euro funf

Waigel weist Vorsto des

sachsischen
Regierungschefs zuruck,
Suddeutsche
Zeitung, July 28, 1997.

Helmut Schmidt uber

die sechs Grunde,
aus denen der Euro nicht scheitern darfschon
gar nicht an den Deutschen, Die Zeit, June 13, 1997.
Helmut Schmidt, Die Bundesbankkein Staat im Staate, Die Zeit, November 8, 1996.
See Banchoff, German Identity.

Identity Politics and European Integration

309

of Europe, as existential for further integration. Kohl appeared to believe that if the house of Europe was not built then, it would not be
built ten years later. He even argued that the success of the EMU was a
question of war and peace.55 Kohls convictions were not unique among
the German political elite. It is interesting that those parts of the Green
Party who supported the Euro used almost the same language as the chancellor. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who was a Green Party leader
in the Bundestag at the time, claimed that the only alternative to an early
start of the Euro was a return to the European past of power balancing
and nationalism.56
The strength of this elite consensus on European order and German
European identity became particularly apparent when it was challenged.
As argued above, even those opposed to the EMU did not dare touch the
German consensus on European integration but framed their criticism in
terms of asking for a delay and/or demanding a strict application of the
convergence criteria. Individual politicians from the CDU/CSU coalition
and the former SPD opposition had repeatedly tried to criticize the agreement that forced Germans to give up their cherished Deutsche Mark but
failed to gather support even from their fellow party members.57 When
Prime Minister Stoiber criticized the Maastricht Treaty in November 1993
and called for a slowing down of European integration, he was not only
condemned by the SPD and FDP in the Bundestag, but also strongly criticized by fellow Christian Democrats.58 Kohl himself restated his partys
commitment to the goal of European union in a Parliamentary address
insisting that there was no alternative to European unity.
More significant, the opposition SPD had ample opportunities to challenge the consensus on the Euro during the 1994 election year when both
federal and state elections were conducted in Germany. Even though most
Germans opposed the single currency at the time, the SPD refrained from
exploiting this sentiment for its own purpose. The consensus among the
main parties regarding European unity held firm. The SPD did not want
to be regarded as anti-European.
55
56

57

58

For the speech to the German Bundestag, see Kohl: Bei der europaischen
Wahrung
ist
wichtiger als der Kalender, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 28, 1994.
Stabilitat
den Euro bin. Das Jahr Europas: Im Streit um die
See Joschka Fischer, Warum ich fur

Wahrungsunion
geht es um den notwendigen Abschied vom klassischen Nationalstaat,
Die Zeit, March 21, 1997.
Dorothee Heisenberg, Loud and Clear: Germanys EMU Agenda-Setting after Maastricht (paper presented at the Tenth International Conference of Europeanists, March
1417, 1996, Chicago).

Bewegung in Deutschland . . . das ist vorbei.

See Es gab einmal eine europaische

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The response by the SPD majority to occasional challenges to the EMU

from within the party is also significant. Members of the party leadership at the time challenged the Euro but were defeated by the party
majority. In April 1992, for example, Oskar Lafontaine, the prime minister of the Saarland who later became party chairman, tried to commit
the SPD to rejecting a common European currency. He was overruled.
In October 1995 then party chairman Rudolf Scharping, together with

Gerhard Schroder,
the prime minister of Lower Saxony, launched an attack against the EMU. They were immediately reprimanded by other SPD
leaders, members of the European Parliament (EP), and the SPD youth organization that usually represents the partys left wing. When Lafontaine
launched his candidacy for the SPD Party chairmanship a month later, he
explicitly criticized Scharpings attitude toward the common currency as
being inconsistent with the party platform. As candidate for the chancellorship, Schroder was the only voice in the party leadership to remain
skeptical of the Euro, yet in early 1998 he, too, changed his position. He
had originally called for a delayed entry into the third stage because of
economic considerations. At the same time he made it clear that he was a
good European by arguing that a controlled delay would not damage
Europe.59
It is particularly noteworthy that the German center-left largely remained silent over the EMU and that the majority of the Social Democratic elite supported it.60 The German left blamed the record-level unemployment on the Kohl governments austerity measures, but few drew
the obvious connection between those policies and Bonns determination to meet the convergence criteria. The German trade unions refrained
from criticizing the Euro, even though their constituents appeared to be
the biggest losers. Despite the publics growing reluctance to give up the
Deutsche Mark, a fractious debate on the Euro never occurred.
But supporters of the Euro did face significant challenges in Germany
in particular, Deutsche Mark patriotism. This was the ultimate reason
why the Euro was supposed to look very much like the Deutsche Mark
and why political discourse in Germany focused on how strong a currency
the Euro would become. The German government was willing to give
up the previously hegemonic role of the Deutsche Mark within the EMS
only if the future single currency was designed institutionally according to
59
60

Gerhard Schroder
in Den besten Zeitpunkt suchen!
Ton Notermans, The German Social Democrats and Monetary Union, mimeo, ARENA,
University of Oslo, May 1998.

Identity Politics and European Integration

311

German monetary institutions. The European Central Bank was modeled

after Germanys Bundesbank.61
The ECB is statutorily committed to monetary stability, modest state
deficits, and low inflation. The national central-bank governors on the
ECBs council are expected to be independent of their governments or
any other political authority. The Bundesbank insisted on the convergency
criteria securing economic stability for member states willing to participate in the EMU. Germany even managed to commit its partners to a
stability pact that imposed rigid central guidelines and potential fines
for offenders to prevent EMU members from undermining the Euro by
backsliding on economic commitments once they had joined up. Finally,
the German government succeeded in bringing the European Monetary
Institute and later the ECB to Frankfurt, in a further attempt to frame
symbolically the ECB as the successor of the much cherished Bundesbank.
Deutsche Mark patriotism and German Europeanness constitute two
significant aspects of Germanys postwar national identity. Giving up the
Deutsche Mark in favor of the Euro is in accordance with the latter,
but it violates the former aspect of collective identities. It is no wonder,
therefore, that German elite supporters of the EMU worked hard to ensure
that the institutional setup of the single currency looked extremely similar
to German monetary institutions.
To the extent that there was debate in Germany on the single currency,
it was largely framed in terms of German Europeanness versus Deutsche
Mark patriotism. Supporters of the Euro emphasized that the single currency would be as strong and stable as the Deutsche Mark and that
there would be virtually no difference between the twoexcept for the
name. Critics of the EMU tried to capitalize on Deutsche Mark patriotism
and suggesed that the Euro would never reach the stability of the German
currency. The proxy for this identity-related debate was the controversy
surrounding the convergence criteria and the strictness with which they
should be applied. Rigid adherence to the convergence criteria before and
after the EMU became the symbolic causal mechanism by which the strong
Deutsche Mark was going to be converted into an equally strong Euro.
The insistence on the convergence criteria was originally meant to
reassure nervous Germans that the Euro would equal the strength and
61

Goodman, Monetary Sovereignty; T. Notermans, Domestic Preferences and External

Constraints: The Bundesbank between Internal and External Pressures, working paper
series, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 1991; Roland Sturm, How
Independent is the Bundesbank? German Politics 4, 1 (1995): 2741.

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stability of the Deutsche Mark and therefore the savings of ordinary

Germans would be safe. In 1997, however, it appeared that Germany
would have a hard time reaching the convergence criteria because of its
sluggish economic growth and high unemployment rate. Opponents of
the single currency then started using the convergence criteria as a proxy
to hide their criticism of the EMU. They hammered away at popular fears
that the Euro would not become as strong a currency as the Deutsche
Mark. The Maastricht Treaty stipulated that the budget deficit should
not exceed 3 percent of the GDP. This criterion was constructed as the
benchmark for judging the future quality of the Euro.
The exaggerated emphasis on meeting the convergence criteria to the
last decimal point had little to do with economic policy.62 It reflected instead a particular reading of German history before World War II and
collective memories of rising inflation and the worldwide economic crisis
that helped the Nazis gain power. Again, the other in this part of
German collective identity was the countrys own past. Overcoming the
German past not only meant supporting European integration but also
instituting sound economic policies of low inflation and controlled budget deficits so as never again to be tempted to solve economic problems
by printing money. The Deutsche Mark became the symbolic embodiment of this economic policy. Over the years the Deutsche Mark acquired a highly identity-inducing value as a powerful national symbol of
Germanys prosperity and its economic miracle after World War II.
Important components of the mythical story of the Wirtschaftswunder
(Economic Miracle) at the beginning of the new Federal Republic are
social market economy, monetary reform, and ultimately the
Deutsche Mark.63 The 1948 monetary reform with the introduction of the
Deutsche Mark and the swift change from shortage of goods to consumer
paradise are linked to Germans particular understanding of a social market economy (soziale Marktwirtschaft), which contributed much to West
Germanys self-confidence. The Deutsche Mark therefore symbolized the
rise from the ruins of World War II.
62

63

See the absurd German debate in the summer of 1997 over whether 3.0 meant three,

zero or three, something: Stoiber beharrt auf Kritik an EWU, Suddeutsche

Zeitung,
June 23, 1997; Germans Resolve Feud over Euro, International Herald Tribune, July

Euro-Start ohne Paris fur

moglich,

2, 1997; Huber halt

Suddeutsche
Zeitung, July 7,
1997; Pressure Mounts in Bonn to Delay Emu, Financial Times, July 7, 1997; Edmund
Stoiber: Defender of a Decimal Point, Financial Times, July 7, 1997.

Dieter Haselbach, Soziale Marktwirtschaft als Grundungsmythos.

Zur Iden
titatsbildung
im Nachkriegsdeutschland, in Claudia Mayer-Iswandy, ed., Zwischen
Traum und TraumaDie Nation. Transatlantische Perspektiven zur Geschichte eines

Stauffenburg, 1994), 256.

Problems (Tubingen:

Identity Politics and European Integration

313

The irony was that the federal government was caught in its own
rhetoric. Compared with its European partners, Bonn had insisted on
a very rigid interpretation of the convergence criteria in order to reassure a nervous German public and to guarantee that EU members instituted the necessary austerity policies to meet the criteria. As a result,
Chancellor Kohl and Finance Minister Theo Waigel reduced their own
flexibility with regard to Germany meeting the criteria. When Waigel
desperately tried to generate additional resources by proposing that
the Bundesbank should revalue its gold reserves and transfer the revenue into Bonns 1997 budget figures, he was immediately accused of
creative accounting by his European partners. More important, the
Bundesbank, which had only grudgingly accepted the single currency to
begin with, launched a campaign against the federal government by linking up with Euroskeptics in Waigels own Bavarian CSU. The Bundesbank
won the battle, even though a re-evaluation of currency rather than gold
reserves was to be accounted for in the federal budget in early
1998.64
In sum, German political elites, including Chancellor Kohl, who strongly
supported the EMU tried to square the circle. They favored a single currency as a major step toward European political union, something they
regarded as necessary to anchor a united Germany firmly in Western political and economic institutions. Moreover, the single currency would
stabilize German Europeanness and constitutional patriotism at the
same time. But the elites also had to deal with Deutsche Mark patriotism. Insistence on a strict application of the convergence criteria, in
particular the 3 percent goal with regard to budget deficits, was meant
to increase the political acceptability and legitimacy of the EMU by constructing the Euro as a Deutsche Mark with a different name. But the
more rigidly the political elites interpreted the convergence criteria, the
less likely it became that Germany would meet them. Delaying the entry
date in a single currency was no way out, since supporters of the EMU
had convinced themselves that this would have spelled the end of the
single currencyand possibly of European integration as a whole. Moreover, cutting the German budget deficit increase to less than 3 percent
of GDP involved deep cuts in the German welfare state. The self-inflicted
strict interpretation of the Maastricht criteria challenged the famous
64

See Zentralbankrat einigt sich mit Bonn, Suddeutsche

Zeitung, June 13, 1997. See also
in Bonn, Paris und Brussel:

Streit und Rankune

Wird der Euro verschoben? Die Zeit,
June 13, 1997.

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German consensus on the welfare state and the social market economy,
yet another component of German national identity.
CONCLUSIONS

The German political elites thoroughly constructed a European German

nation-state identity after World War II. These identity constructions originated during the interwar period and became dominant among German
elites forced into exile during World War II. When the Federal Republic
came into being in 1949, German nationalism had been shattered by the
catastrophe of Nazi Germany. It was no longer possible to relate positively
to German nationalism, since it became identified with militarism, authoritarianism, and, ultimately, the Nazis. At this critical juncture Europe
provided the way out for the construction of a postnational identity suitable for a Federal Republic that needed to distance itself from the German
past. Europe symbolized almost everything to which the new Germany
aspiredthe values of peace, democracy, human rights, enlightenment,
modernity, and Christianity. The German SPD embraced European integration in the late 1950s, and the federalist consensus has remained
stable ever since. The German European nation-state identity explains
why there was not much debate about changing course after unification
in 1990. Chancellor Kohl could count on the elite consensus in his conviction that united Germany would remain firmly committed to the European
Union. The single currency, the Euro, became the symbol for this commitment. Stubborn German support for the EMU must be understood in this
framework of identity politics. Even those who opposed the single currency framed their arguments in identity-related termsDeutsche Mark
patriotism.
German Europeanness nevertheless contains distinctive national elements. First, Europes other (against which the collective nation-state
identity is being constructed) is not another region in the world, but
Germanys and Europes own past of militarism and balance of power.
As a result, the new Europe is seen primarily as a stable peace order in
almost Kantian terms of a pacific federation combining cooperation
with external partners with liberal democracy internally. Second, the prevailing visions of the European order are distinctively German in the sense
that German cooperative federalism serves as the primary model for the
construction of Europe. The United States of Europe are not seen as
a unitary state with a strong central government, but as a distinctively

Identity Politics and European Integration

315

federalist order, as Joschka Fischers speech in Berlin in May 2000 confirmed again. The model is the Bonn republic, not Paris and the Fifth
Republic. In this sense, visions of European order are strongly connected
and relate to the German domestic institutional setup. Thus, Germans
ideas about Europe and the European order are strongly correlated with
their own domestic order.
German Europeanness also serves as an example of how political elites
manipulate and instrumentalize collective nation-state identities for political purposes. Almost single-handedly, Chancellor Adenauer constructed
the Federal Republics European identity in order to justify and legitimize
a foreign policy oriented toward the West. He used the German past, notions of a Sonderweg and of a seesaw policy between East and West,
to denounce the political opposition to his preferred course of action.
This time Germany should be firmly anchored in the West to prevent a return to the nationalist past. Since this identity construction resonated well
with the widespread enthusiasm for European integration at the time, and
since Adenauers foreign and domestic policies proved highly successful,
the opposition failed. When the SPD turned around after two election
defeats, the German federalist consensus emerged.
Consensual identity constructions can be used for instrumental purposes. Consider the Euro. Chancellor Kohl attached his support for the
single currency to the German Europeanized nation-state identity. This
effectively silenced potentially strong domestic opposition. It became impossible to discuss the Euro in purely economic terms and to weigh the
costs and benefits of it in a politically neutral way. The single currency
was identified with the political project of European integration as a whole
and, thus, with a project each good German had to approve. Skeptics
had to demonstrate that they were good Europeans. Only then could
they criticize the Euro. Deutsche Mark patriotism simply was not strong
enough to counter Euro patriotism.
German Europeanness is firmly anchored in the collective nation-state
identity of the German political elites. But what about the German mass
public? Data on mass public opinion appear to show that the German
public has supported European integration in terms of a permissive consensus for a long time. Cracks in the consensus occurred only recently
and are probably related to the fact that European issues such as the single
currency increasingly hit home, become politicized and subject to political controversy. There is not much evidence, however, that the German
public at largeEast and Weststrongly identifies with the European

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Union.65 This is probably the most important disjuncture between elite

opinion and mass public opinion concerning the European Union. At the
same time, the issue salience of European issues among the mass public
is still not very high. For only a few people European policies are among
the most significant themes they care about.
As a result, and given the strong elite consensus concerning European
integration, dissatisfaction with European issues (including the single currency) is unlikely to translate easily from the mass public to the elite level.
So far no major party has tried to instrumentalize latent anti-European
feelings among the public at large. The collective identification with
Europe on the elite level prevents public misgivings from becomingat
least for the time beingpolitically salient.
65

Hans Rattinger, Einstellungen zur europaischen

Integration in der Bundesrepublik: Ein
Internationale Beziehungen 3, 1 (1996): 4578; Hans
Kausalmodell, Zeitschrift fur

Rattinger, Joachim Behnke, and Christian Holst, Auenpolitik und offentliche

Meinung in der Bundesrepublik. Ein Datenhandbuch zu Umfragen seit 1954 (Frankfurt/M.:
Peter Lang, 1995).

14
Nationalisms in Spain: The Organization
of Convivencia
A N D R E S D E B L A S G U E R R E R O

If any single detail lends sense to the general theory of nationalism, it is

a consciousness of the close connection between nationalist movements
and ideologies within the framework of similar historical junctures and
interconnected geographical and political spaces. This fact stands out even
more prominently in the case of nationalisms born and developed within
the limits of a single state. On a general level, Spanish nationalism has
a long history with many complex precedents, as befits a society that
emerged as a nation-state in the early-modern period. Since 1898, however, the course of Spanish nationalism has been inseparable from its
relations with the Basque and Catalan regionalist movements that consolidated and evolved into nationalist movements after the beginning of
the twentieth century. The principal political problem in Spain since the
reestablishment of democracy in 1976 has been organizing convivencia
(peaceful coexistence) among the different national consciences existing
within a state immersed in the general process of European integration.
The need to observe carefully the complex relationship between the national consciences and realities of Spain has been obstructed on occasion
by a reductionist vision that tends to devalue the common political nation
and to emphasize Spains privileged cultural nationalities. The rebirth of
nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe has reinforced the focus of
recent studies of nationalism on those manifestations of the phenomenon
that originate in ethno-linguistic communities with political aspirations
in conflict with the states of which they form a part. This approach runs
the risk of overlooking other state-based national factors, especially those
that were also influential in the emergence of the idea of the nation, and
continue to carry considerable weight in the world today.
This chapter was translated from Spanish by Ben Erhlers.

317

318

A N D R E S

DE

BLAS GUERRERO

At times the problem arises strictly in the definition of terms. More

than one commentator has proposed reserving the concept of nation
for those ethno-linguistic communities and using the term patria to describe nations with a preferential position within the state. Although
this proposal could work in the abstract, it is not very feasible since the
bulk of the major Western languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian,
Portuguese) have not adopted this restricted use of the term nation.
Paradoxically, Spanish nationalism has been studied considerably less
on the general level than on the level of peripheral nationalisms.1 This
highly anomalous situation presents a challenge not only for the political scientist, the historian, or the practitioner of public law, but also for
common sense: overall, Spanish nationalism has enjoyed a great deal of
success (if by success we mean the construction and maintenance
of a state over a prolonged period of time), especially in contrast to
the more modest and recent political gains of the peripheral Spanish
nationalisms.2
What are the causes of such a remarkable situation? The intellectual
and academic climate proves of little use in considering the formula of
1

Maiz, eds., Los naOn Spanish nationalism in general, see Justo Beramendi and Ramon
de la II Republica

cionalismos en la Espana
(Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1991); Alberto Botti,
(Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1992);
Cielo y dinero: El nacionalcatolicismo en Espana
de Espana
(Madrid: Catedra,

Inman Fox, La invencion

1997); Juan Pablo Fusi, Espana,
nacionalidades, regiones, in Javier Tusell, Emilio Lamo, and Rafael Pardo, eds., Entre dos
y Estado en la

siglos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996); Guillermo Gotazar,

ed., Nacion
liberal (Madrid: Noesis, 1994); Jose Maria Jover, Introduccion,

Espana
in Jose Maria
vol. 34 (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1981); Juan Marichal,
Jover, ed., Historia de Espana,
(Madrid: Taurus, 1995); Jose Antonio Rocamora, El nacionalismo
El secreto de Espana

iberico (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1994); Andres de Blas Guerrero, Tradicion

(Madrid: Tecnos, 1991); and Andres de Blas Guerrero,
republicana y nacionalismo espanol
ed., Enciclopedia del nacionalismo (Madrid: Tecnos, 1997). See also Studia Historica,

1994. For a recent synthesis of state and nation building in Spain, see Luis Gonzalez
y las Espanas
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997).
Espana
Anton,
On nationalism in Catalonia, see in particular Albert Balcells, Catalan Nationalism: Past
and Present (London: Macmillan, 1996); Joan Benet, Bibliografia sobre el nacionalisme
cuestion

catala` (Barcelona: Fundacio Jaume Bofill, 1974); Josep M. Colomer, Cataluna

en el debate cultural
de Estado (Madrid: Tecnos, 1986); Horst Hina, Castilla y Cataluna
(Barcelona: Pennsula, 1986); Isidre Molas, Lliga Catalana (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1974);
burguesa (Madrid: Edicusa, 1970); and Eric
Jordi Sole Tura, Catalanismo y revolucion
Ucelay da Cal, La Catalunya populista (Barcelona: La Magrana, 1982).
del naOn Basque nationalism, see Javier Corcuera, Or genes, ideolog a y organizacion
cionalismo vasco (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1979); Antonio Elorza, Ideolog as del nacionalismo
Haramburu, 1978); Juan Pablo Fusi, El Pa s Vasco. Pluralismo y
vasco (San Sebastian:

nacionalidad (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1984); Fernando Grac a de Cortazar

y Juan
Manuel Azcona, El nacionalismo vasco: un siglo de historia (Madrid: Tecnos, 1995);

Jon Juaristi, El bucle melancolico

(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1997); Juan Jose Solozabal,
El primer nacionalismo vasco (Madrid: Tucar Ediciones, 1975); and Patxo Unzueta, Los
nietos de la ira (Madrid: El Pas-Aguilar, 1988).

Nationalisms in Spain

319

national convivencia that underlies Spains current autonomous state.3

The good intentions and bad conscience of the nationalist protests in
Catalonia and the Basque country have inspired in the immediate past
a pattern of general explanations that have not always recognized that
the Spanish nation has never been the mere sum of its nationalities and
regionsa state whose most coherent inspiration would presumably be
the logic of quasi-confederation.
Among all the questions implicit in the organization of national convivencia in Spain, I would like to call attention to several of special relevance. First, I will briefly address the construction of the state and the
nation in the Spanish case and the impact that the unification of Europe
has had on both since the beginning of the twentieth century. I will then
attempt to illustrate the significance of the idea of national pluralism as
an indispensable prerequisite for the organization of this convivencia. In
conclusion, I will assess the current autonomous state as a political formula capable of guaranteeing a balanced solution to the national question
in Spain.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SPANISH NATIONAL STATE

AND THE HORIZON OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

Spanish historiographers and political scientists are now aware of the

shortcomings of traditionalism, both ingenuous and politically motivated,
in explaining the models for state making and nation building. The roads
to modernity, as Liah Greenfeld has shown, are not reducible to a single basic design, be it French or British.4 The peculiarities evident in the
emergence of the state and the nation in Spain do not, however, constitute
an exception to the panorama of Western Europe. As Charles Tilly states
in his preface to Coercion, Capital, and the European States, 990-1990,
3

For a survey of the Spanish autonomous state, see Juan Pablo Fusi, El desarollo au 19751986

tonomico,
in Javier Tusell and Alvaro Soto, eds., Historia de la transicion,
(Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1996); Eduardo Garc a de Enterr a, Estudios sobre autonom as territoriales (Madrid: Civitas, 1985); Luis Mart n Rebollo, ed., El futuro de
las autonom as territoriales (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 1990); Luis Moreno,
de Espana
(Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1997); Francisco Pena
D ez, ed., El EsLa federalizacion

tado autonomico
(Madrid: Ministerio de Administraciones Publicas,
1993); Alberto Perez
de las Comunidades Autonomas

Calvo, ed., La participacion

en las decisiones del Estado
(Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1993); Joaquin Tornos et al., Informe sobre las autonom as (Madrid: Civitas, 1988); National Institute of Public Administration

(INAP), El funcionamiento del Estado autonomico

(Madrid: Ministerio de Administra Administrativa, 1993, nos. 232-3.

ciones Publicas,
1996); and Documentacion
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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in previous investigations I proved once and again that the Spanish experience was quite comprehensible on its own terms, although it did not
conform to the generalizations developed by political scientists studying
the history of England, France, and Prussia. It did not make sense to call
Spain eccentric; the fault clearly lay with the generalizations, not with
Spain.5
The long era of martial conflict with the Muslim world, present in
the Iberian Peninsula since the invasion of the eighth century, culminated
at the end of the fifteenth century. The Christian kingdoms born of the
Reconquest would become an expression of political pluralism, but they
never broke free of the influence of the idea of a unified Spain under
the government of Rome or especially under the Visigothic monarchy
terminated by the Muslim invasion. One of the most significant aspects
of the Hispanic reunification begun in the late fifteenth century was the
weight of the crown of Castile in terms of demographic potential, wealth,
and territorial control. The modern Spanish state, born like other Western
countries as a national state, was thus dominated by a single region at
the expense of the other kingdoms and jurisdictions that constituted the
union. When an alteration of demographic, economic, and social trends
in favor of the periphery began at the end of the seventeenth century,
the opportune political consequences for the state would not be easy to
discern.
The Spanish state that emerged from the traumatic Iron Age of the
seventeenth century experienced abnormally prolonged moments of peace
in the Age of Enlightenment and a difficult assimilation of liberal politics
in the nineteenth century. This was a state certain of its identity. Its status
as a national state was practically beyond question. Indeed, the Spanish
state was even envied on occasion by the rest of Europe.
The impact of the disturbances at the end of the nineteenth century
cannot be underestimated. Political Catalan nationalism (catalanismo)
became important during the first decade of the twentieth century, and
Basque nationalism established a more modest presence over the course of
the first third of this century. These movements caused centrifugal tensions
in the republic, although they were in no way comparable to the social and
economic tensions that ended in the tragedy of 1936. The most serious
crisis of national conscience, the crisis that to a degree still afflicts us
today, is that which began with the sudden interruption of our liberal
5

capital y los estados europeos, 9901990 (Madrid: Alianza UniCharles Tilly, Coercion,
versidad, 1992).

Nationalisms in Spain

321

tradition by Francoism. The crisis continued during the fight against his
dictatorship and the process of transition to democracy.
The dictatorship of Franco attempted to terminate the nationalist and
regionalist demands that had been present in Spain since the last decades
of the nineteenth century. Consequently, there was a return to unifying
and centralist bases of government unhindered by the limits and balances inherent in the liberal political order. The Franco regime found
itself obliged to adopt this centralist option by virtue of its totalitarian,
and then authoritarian, nature. The reestablishment of democracy was
necessarily accompanied by various forms of territorial distribution of
power. These developments were prompted as much by the pressure of
peripheral nationalisms as by the prestige brought on during the 1960s
and 1970s by regional economic and administrative projects designed to
encourage political participation.
This pressure to reformulate the model of territorial organization of
the state was complemented by the supranational integration after World
War II, which had remained to a large degree at the margin under the
dictatorship of Franco. Since the beginning of the twentieth century at
least, the cause of European integration had been inseparable from the
process of economic and social modernization and the reform of the liberal
order begun in the first decades of the nineteenth century. For the majority
of the opposition to the dictatorship, full integration into the European
Community remained a fundamental political aspiration. Some viewed
this aspiration, doubtless somewhat precipitously, as the prelude to a rapid
dissolution of the national state and of the idea of the political nation, both
now thrown into dispute by the processes of supranational integration and
the demands of internal devolution.
This is not the moment for a digression into this supposed process of
autodissolution of the state prefigured by the new post-Hobbesian order
that would develop in Spain. But we weary of the supposed imminence
and inevitability of the terminal crisis of the liberal-democratic Leviathan.
As Michael Mann and others have pointed out, Eurocentricism dominates our vision of a crisis that is not easy to determine in great powers
such as the United States, Japan, and Germany, or in smaller states struggling to liberate themselves from the pre-Hobbesian stage dominant in
their societies.6 It is time to question, not only this Eurocentricism, but
also the unidirectional character of certain phenomena that have been
6

Michael Mann, Nation-States in Europe and Other Continents, Daedalus, vol. 122, no.
3 (1993).

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seen as implacably challenging the state. An example is the activity of the

great multinational corporations or international organizations that, it is
sometimes claimed, have actually served to guarantee the continuing existence of several state apparatus, particularly in the Third World. Neither
these influences, nor the new systems of international security, nor the limitations inherent in the idea of sovereignty represent sufficient reason to
speak of the immediate end of national states although these states will undoubtedly be submitted to substantial modifications and adaptations proceeding from the intensification of international relations at every level.
In the case of Spain, the lack of moderation with which this complex
situation has been contemplated is most unfortunate. Nor can we ignore
the vague influence of a German syndrome reflected in the difficulty
of reconciling one segment of the Spanish people with their immediate
political past. There is an obvious distance between the horror of the
Holocaust and the excesses of the dictatorship of Franco. This distance,
however, lessened the discomfort with the past manifested in a lack of
loyalty to the idea of the national state. One indirect consequence of this
situation has been a pronounced pro-European stance among the political
elites, both state and peripheral, which merely serves to underscore the
relative indifference in some quarters to the erosion of the legitimacy of
the state, apparently condemned to obsolescence in a new age. In their
search for long-term historical explanations, some historians have played
down the importance of the events of the immediate past. In the same
way, some political actors, in their determined vision of the future, have
overlooked the short-term problems that will continue to plague states
lacking the necessary legitimacy to carry out their functions.

PLURALISM IN THE IDEA OF THE NATION AND

ITS APPLICATION TO SPAIN

The distinction between the idea of the political nation and the cultural nation, first made by Ferdinand Meinecke, has hardly ever been
applied to the Spanish case, despite the rationale behind its creation and
the possibilities it contains for the treatment of certain national questions
from the perspective of democratic pluralism.7 The political nation
emerges in Europe as an ideological reference point destined to facilitate
7

Ferdinand Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1970); and idem, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).

Nationalisms in Spain

323

the life of the state.8 Far from being the consequence of a pre-existing na (Great Interpreter)
tional reality, this state is typically the gran truchiman
postulated by Ortega y Gasset to explain the appearance of nations.9
The substantially political genesis of the nation is in no way exclusive to
Europe. The United States, Latin America, and subsequently Africa and
Asia set the stage for a pattern of nations that cannot be the result of a
prior ethno-linguistic homogeneity.
The origins of this type of nation are old and can be traced to the very
birth of the modern state in the form of the nation-state. Nevertheless, the
question of national origins did not attain authentic importance until an
advanced date. When the cohesion of the state depends upon other political and ideological meansdynastic fidelity or religious bonds surviving
through the all-powerful force of traditionthe nation is an ideological construction largely without foundation. The liberal state discovered
all its potential through the advantageous substitution of fallen idols.
As exemplified by liberal states such as Britain, France, the United States,
Germany, and Spain, national characterundoubtedly conditioned by the
complex process of protonationalismtakes on a distinct meaning and
an urgency to conform to the internal and external demands that bring
about national mobilization. Resistance to the new liberal order, the need
to proceed to the unification of the state, the exigencies of imperial enterprises, and the questioning of the state by emerging nationalist movements
of a secessionist character are some of the factors that modulate the form
and the intensity of this national mobilization in liberal states.
The originality of the nation should not be juxtaposed with the
artificiality of the state. A nation adapts to the necessities brought
about by economic, social, ideological, and political transformations,
and it assumes the multiethnic character of its constituents in accordance with liberal nationalism, generating a type of nationalism that,
as Eugene Kamenka has argued, is based on the citizen and not on ethnic
particularism.10 The individual, possessed of dignity and intrinsic rights,
should be the subject and not the object of the nation and nationalism.
Several decades ago Alfred Cobban pointed out the political consequences
implicit in this type of nation, unlike the model of the organic or cultural
nation.11
8
9
10
11

de Blas Guerrero, Nacionalismos y naciones en Europa (Madrid:

See, in particular, Andres
Alianza Universidad, 1994).
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, 12 vols. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1983).
Eugene Kamenka, ed., Nationalism: The Nature of an Idea (London: E. Arnold, 1976).
Alfred Cobban, Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945).

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To a certain extent, Johann von Herder served as the first great prophet
of a German-based nationalist tradition that argued for a different understanding of the nation. In his view the cultural singularity of a collectivity,
the spirit of the people, is ultimately responsible for the emergence of a
nation. This nation should not be constituted by historical-political factors or by the action of the state, but rather by the delimitation of territorial political organizations. The enjoyment of the state itself is considered
indispensable as a guarantee of the differentiated cultural personality of
the people, something that, for Herder, possesses greater value than the
collectivity.12
One recurring problem is how to identify the causes for the sudden
appearance of this second type of nation. In most cases it can be attributed
to external conflicts of the kind that inspired Fichtes Discourses to the
German Nation.13 In other cases, however, the element that unleashes the
process can be found in internal factors. Industrialism, for example, may
reveal differences in wealth between territories within the state that had
previously lived together in harmony. Other factors include urbanization,
the impact of educating the masses, and the turmoil generated by largescale migrations.
Even allowing for the importance of the aforementioned factors, the
historian and the political scientist cannot neglect the power of ideologies and nationalist movements in constructing new communities. Several
databases would doubtless be necessary for any viable quantitative study
of nationalism. Even then such statistics would provide a backdrop for,
rather than any strict determinant of, the new national-cultural realities.
This conception of the nation will necessarily give rise to another type
of nationalism, one characterized by its supra-individual foundation in
addition to its taste for diversity and its inevitable enthusiasm for that
which is unique to each people. The protagonist of the nation is the cultural entity, and the rights of the nation are not derived fundamentally
from its citizens, but rather from the living and eternal organism that
forms the cultural basis of the nation.
It goes without saying that Meineckes two classes of nations, both of

which echo Toenniess

older distinction between the idea of community
and society, are ideal types rather than attempts to describe a complex
reality.14 Their usefulness, however, is beyond question for the simple
12
13
14

Johann von Herder, Obra selecta (Madrid: Altaquara, 1982).

alemana (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1977).
Johann G. Fichte, Discursos a la nacion

Community and Society (New York: Transaction Books, 1963).

Ferdinand Toennies,

Nationalisms in Spain

325

reason that political nations inevitably tend to project themselves

into the field of cultural practice. The level of pretension to homogeneity in this area is basically a function of the level of resistance
encountered by the unfolding liberal nation-state. This proof runs parallel to the fact that cultural nations encompass the most salient
instrumental and utilitarian components of political nations. If we
lose sight of this, we cannot understand the evolution of cultural
nationalisms in the Western world into new middle class nationalism, so important today in some European countries and in Canada.
Michael Keatings comparative study of Scotland, Quebec, and Catalonia
demonstrates this point exceptionally well.15 The usefulness of the distinction between political and cultural nationalisms lies in its
ability to help us understand the plurality inherent in nations, as well
as the ideological dispositions of different nationalist movements and
ideologies.
In the same geographical space, different kinds of nations can coincide. The political nations of the Jacobins and the Girondins existed on
the same French soil as the nation understood by E. Renan, M. Barr`es,
or C. Maurras, the nation of the republican and socialist tradition, the
nation of the nationalists in the first three decades of the twentieth
century, and the hypothetical cultural nationalities of the Bretons, Occitans, Corsicans, and Alsatians, all of whom have attempted in recent
years to find a place within the tangled skein of European nationalities.
Once the first destructive stage has been overcome, once we have abandoned the tacit or express invitation to a new and fatal struggle of the
collectivities in which nations take the place of social classes or races,
democratic politics must find a harmonizing formula for these complex
communities. Cultural relativism, in which all cultural and political traditions are equivalent for the simple reason that they are particular
and different, may seem incompatible with this objective, but it is imperative to create mechanisms of political integration that favor shared
loyalties among nations of different types that coexist in the same territory. A propitious climate for these shared loyalties can be created through
the territorial distribution of power and by accepting a liberal-democratic
political culture that instead of allowing itself to be dazzled by the charms
of homogeneity views the call to exclusive loyalties as a return to the worst
moments of a happily vanquished past. To argue in favor of the attractions of cultural pluralism and yet conclude by invoking the motto one
15

Michael Keating, Naciones contra el estado (Barcelona: Ariel, 1996).

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people, one nation, one state is a self-contradiction exposed long ago

by the famous proponent of pluralism and scholar of nationalism, Lord
Acton.
In my opinion the autonomous Spanish state, its obvious gains notwithstanding, has not fully encouraged the acceptance of a climate of national
pluralism in accord with the mandates of the constitution of 1978. This
situation is essentially the result of actions by peripheral nationalisms
in Catalonia and the Basque country, groups immersed in a process of
national construction and affirmation that has forced them to deny the
Spanish national community of which they form a substantial part, both
historically and today.
The response of Catalan and Basque nationalists to the idea of
Spanish nationalism is not all that different from Spanish nationalists
response to peripheral nationalisms. But while Spanish democracy
continues to recognize, little by little, national cultures in convivencia
with the political nation, the peripheral nationalisms demonstrate an
increasing doctrinal obstinacycompatible at times with a remarkable flexibility in political practice. Apparently, these Catalan and
Basque nationalists are convinced that their national aspirations can be
achieved by means of a radical inversion of the established method of
viewing the problem, and through the voluntary negation of a Spanish national community in favor of a strictly governmental interpretation of Spain. To what extent can the national government be
described as an oppressor? This question frequently provides the terrain
on which moderates and radicals among peripheral nationalists mark their
boundaries.
This denationalization of Spain, which parallels certain autonomous
communities insistence on their prior status as nations, openly
conflicts with the spirit of the governing constitutional framework.

J. J. Solozabal,
an expert on the Spanish Constitution, has examined the
Spanish national state as a state of autonomies.16 In 1931 some of
those responsible for the republican constitution believed themselves to
be engaged in a revolutionary process with the capacity to create a
new state. The current Spanish constitution, by contrast, is the
expression of the continuity of a Spanish nation that is open to convivencia with other eventual realities, particularly of a cultural
nature.
16

Juan Jose Solozabal,

El estado autonomico
como estado nacional, Sistema 116 (1993).

Nationalisms in Spain

327

CONCLUSION: OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES

All the problems of legitimacy in the national liberal-democratic state

cannot be attributed to the activity of peripheral nationalisms or to a
process of European integration still poorly understood with regard to
its consequences for the national state. Also contributing to the erosion
of this state in the immediate past are three other sources: the traditional
right, anarchism, and Spanish Marxism.
The first of these involves the challenge presented to the liberal democratic order by the traditional right, which with great difficulty has substituted its understanding of the state and the nation with an identification
with the Altar and the Throne. It would be wise to rethink the automatic identification between Catholicism, ultraconservative thought, and
Spanish nationalism over the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
This apparent identification, the phenomenon of national Catholicism,
cannot hide the fears that the far right in Spain and in other Western
nationsespecially Francemaintained with respect to the liberal and
modernizing components of the political nation, such as that created in
Spain by the liberal revolution.17 The genuine Spanish reactionaries, suspicious of any modernizing component that casts a shadow over the ideological leadership of the Catholic Church or over the supposed consubstantiality between a specific interpretation of Catholicism and the idea
of Spain, distrust even Barr`es and Maurras. Neither Carlism, nor wide
sectors of the Spanish far right in the early twentieth century, nor the
Espanola

majority of the men in Accion

went beyond a vague patriotism,
a heightened piety, which characterizes the legitimate defenders of the
old order in the moment of confrontation with the new national reality.
This situation underwent modifications during the sharpening of social
conflict under the Second Republic. At that time the nation came to be
regarded as the last ditch defense of a threatened social order. The Franco
regime co-opted the rhetoric of Spanish nationalism in its most conservative version. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to underestimate the
Francoists suspicion of the idea of the Spanish nation and its liberal roots.
The dictatorship had certain permanent reference points: Anti-Spain,
the loving cultivation of the memory of the Civil War, the persistence of
an image of a Spain of conquerors and conquered. These fundamental
ideological positions are all manifestations of resistance to an idea of a
17

Morodo, Los or genes ideologicos

Alberto Botti, Cielo y dinero; Raul
del franquismo:
Espanola

Accion
(Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1985).

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national community capable of integrating its citizens in the perception

of a shared present and past.
The second great negative contribution to the process now under consideration brought with it one of the most genuinely Hispanic contributions to political thought and practice in Europe and America. This was
anarchism.18 From its beginning it presented a formidable obstacle to
the unification of the divided nation. Its enmity first toward the liberal
state, and subsequently toward the liberal-democratic state, proved irrevocable. Anarchists mobilized wide sectors of the working classes to deny
any common political space for all Spaniards. The revolutionary utopia
of libertarian communism did not survive the Civil War. The most unfortunate face of the anarchist movement, however, did. I refer to the radical
individualism of Max Stirner, the diffuse influence of Nietzsche, and the
early twentieth-century positions that social Darwinism brought to the
door of the far right. The complex political-aesthetic position associated
with anarchism contributed considerably to the problems of legitimacy
of the state and the nation in Spain. The influence of this negative contribution continues to the present.
Thirdly, we must recognize the dysfunctional role of Spanish Marxism
in this process. Throughout the transition, the Marxist-inspired political
parties emphasized issues such as the right of self-determination and the
Marxist-Leninist vision of the nation and the stateissues that could do
little to help achieve a reasonable and realistic formulation of the new citizen who would emerge from beneath the repression of the dictatorship.
Without neglecting the integrating potential implicit in an ideological discourse, I remain convinced that for a wide sector of the Spanish left,
Marxism proved a deficient means of addressing the national-regional
problem in Spain. If the Socialist Party remained indebted to MarxistLeninist influences until 1982, the exercise of power and the assumption
of clearly social-democratic positions since that time have rectified the
Marxist-Leninists vision of the national problem. This does not apply to
the minority Communist Party and its electoral coalition (the Izquierda
Unida), but these groups have been persistently confused and ambiguous
on this matter.
The nationalist crisis in the Basque country and Catalonia has undermined loyalty to the re-emerging democratic state in Spain. For complex
reasons, the delegitimization of Francoism was prolonged, until 1982 at
18

J. Alvarez Junco, La teor a pol tical del anarquismo, in Fernando Vallesp n, ed., Historia de la teor a pol tica, vol. 4 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992).

Nationalisms in Spain

329

least, by the delegitimization of the state. The boundaries have not always
been clear between a dictatorial regime, a state profoundly penetrated by
the logic of the dictatorship, and a nation with a long history of liberalism
behind it. The updated Basque and Catalan nationalist movements have
taken advantage of this ambiguity. They are intent on constructing their
hegemony in the Basque country and Catalonia on fragments of legitimacy torn from the Spanish state and nation. The greater solidity and
consequent self-assurance of Catalan nationalism allowed, however, the
partial reconsideration of this position by the Catalan nationalist party,
the CIU. The nationalism of the Basque Nationalist Party is more radical.
This party is conscious of the precariousness of its political hegemony,
gained in part through the exceptional circumstances created by the terrorist practices of ETA (Euskadi y Libertad ).
Since the reestablishment of democracy in Spain and the implementation of the constitution of 1978, the obstacles to the liberal-democratic
state posed by the traditional right, by anarchists, and by Spanish Marxists have finally been eliminated. The overwhelming majority of the old
Spanish right has opted for the democratic political formulas expressed
de Centro
by parties of the center and the right of center, such as Union

Democratico
(UCD), the Centro Democratico
y Social (CDS), and the
current Partido Popular (PP). The former anarchist syndicate has disappeared from our political scene, and traditional Marxism has given way
to the modern social-democratic positions of the renovated Partido So (PSOE). The only significant refutation of the
cialista Obrero Espanol
state that remains in force today is directed against the role of the state
as a nation, not against its liberal-democratic character.
In this context several commentators have inevitably argued for European integration and the convenience of forgetting the national character of the Spanish state. By this logic the state could be replaced by
something like a sum of nationalities, an ambiguous nation of nations
that vaguely recalls the hardly reassuring formula of conversion in the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire on the eve of its extinction. Some believe
that the forced blurring of the Spanish national conscience is the best expedient, given the importance of peripheral nationalism and the process
of European integration. In Spain the problems of the legitimacy of the
national liberal-democratic state have not been associated wholly with
peripheral nationalism or with European integrationa process with
consequences for the future of the nation-state that are still poorly understood. However, it makes better sense to think that Spanish nationalism,
with distinctly liberal-democratic origins and committed both to a plural

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state and the cause of Europe, is better equipped to arrive at a national

accord that would allow Spain to deal effectively with the final consolidation of the autonomous state and the complex process of building
Europe.
This project would not be as difficult as it may at times appear. If one
takes a dispassionate view, one can argue that there are no legitimate
political motives in Spain for challenging the state: neither economic exploitation on the national level, nor particular historical injuries, nor reluctance to negotiate on the part of the government. Until the twentieth
century was well under way, Spain had a well-organized democratic political system, a society conscious of the deep connections within it, and a
spacemuch more solid in its economic, social, and cultural aspects than
in its strictly political dimensionwhere this society could be articulated.
Perhaps we ought to pay more attention to the consistently higher voter
turnout in national elections than in autonomous and local elections. This
suggests the nationalization of Spanish politics and a preference for the
locus of the state over other public spaces. Collectively, the evidence
should afford us some optimism as we face the national-region question
in Spain and the process of European integration.

15
The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and
Cosmopolitan Perspectives
JAMES TULLY

Three illustrious historiansAnthony Pagden, Biancamaria Fontana, and

John Pocock have contributed to this volume, and it is not easy to follow
them. Rather than advance another survey of ideas of Europe, I would
like to accept one of the ideas they present and investigate it from what
aspires to be a postimperial perspective. The idea I wish to examine is
of Europe as a federation of independent states, and this as a prototype
for the rest of the world. It is closely associated with Immanuel Kant and
Benjamin Constant. For shorthand, I will call it the Kantian or federal
idea of Europe. My thesis is that a survey of the critical attitude that has
developed in response to this idea over the past two hundered years will
change our idea of Europe and its relation to the rest of the world, from
an Eurocentric to a more cosmopolitan conception.1
THE KANTIAN IDEA OF EUROPE AND THE WORLD

Recall how Anthony Pagden, Biancamaria Fontana, and to some degree

John Pocock presented a wide variety of ideas of Europe from various ages
and went on to single out the idea associated with Kant and Constant,
suggesting that it remains relevant today. This idea contains five main
features. First, Europe is tending toward a federation of independent
or sovereign states, each and every one of which has what Kant calls
1

That is, I demur from the suggestion, advanced by many of Kants followers, that his political philosophy is cosmopolitan. Kant claims only that his philosophy has a cosmopolitan
intent. See Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,
in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, ed. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 2940. This I do not dispute. For a recent and unmodified claim that
Kants political and moral philosophy is cosmopolitan, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Kant
and Stoic Cosmopolitanism, The Journal of Political Philosophy 5, 1 (March 1997):
126.

331

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a republican constitution: that is, the formal equality of citizens under

the law, the separation of legislature and executive, and representative
government.2 Second, the federation is held together by five preliminary
articles, the cosmopolitan right of universal hospitality (the right of an
alien not to be treated as an enemy on his arrival in anothers country),
and commerce or the spirit of trade.3 In addition, as Fontana emphasizes in her chapter, Constant added the proviso that variation in local
customs and ways should be tolerated within independent states.4
Third, the European states and their federation are the prototype for a
federation of all the peoples of the world organized into identical states.5
The rise and gradual spread of this idea of federation are, fourth, understood as the consequence of a set of historical processes and stages of
world development, including the spread of commerce and the rule of
law by European wars of imperial expansion.6 Finally, the rise of this
federal idea is understood to mark the decline of an older and incompatible idea of Europe as the center of world empires (an idea related to
European imperialism associated with Napoleon or earlier concepts of
European imperialism based on war, conquest, and the dispossession of
Indigenous and other non-European peoples). Kants sketch of Perpetual
Peace in 1795 marks, as Pagden concludes, the transition from the idea of
empire to federation.7 Although Kant uses his federal idea to criticize
as unjust the imperial spread of European commerce and law-governed

Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in Perpetual Peace and Other
Essays, 10744, 11218. The republican constitution is the first definitive article of peace
and the federation of such states is the second.
Ibid., 10711, 11819, 125. The cosmopolitan right is the means by which commerce is
offered to other nations. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158.
Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to
European Civilization, in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 738, 14956. Constant realized that his defense of
the variety of customs against uniformity was unpopular, and he believed that the economic and political processes of modernization would lead to uniformity in the long run.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 117. (This idea of federalism should eventually include all nations.) See Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain, and France c.1500c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 190. The
federation can use economic power, rather than war, to force other nations to comply
(125).
Pagden, Lords of all the World, 1205; Kant, Idea for a Universal History, 2940. For
a recent historical survey and defense of the stages theory of historical development in
Enlightenment thought, see Istvan Hont, The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind:
Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State in Historical Perspective, in Contemporary
Crisis of the Nation State? ed. John Dunn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 160231.
Pagden, Lords of the all the World, 178200. The title of this concluding chapter is From
Empire to Federation.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

333

colonies by warfare, Kant accepts and builds on this older imperial foundation, understood as the will or mechanism of nature and does
not permit any resistance to it.8
This idea of Europe and of the world as a European federation writ
large is worth serious consideration because it has played the role of something like a Kantian regulative ideal over the two centuries since the
publication of Perpetual Peace in 1795. It has come to function as a more
or less taken-for-granted normative standard against which many people organize and evaluate forms of political association in Europe and
throughout the world. Initially, as we have seen, it gave philosophical expression to widely held assumptions about political association and historical development in eighteenth-century Europe. Across the Atlantic,
James Madison, according to Nicolas Greenleaf Onuf, argued that the
federation of the thirteen Euro-American states in 1787 was modeled on
this continental idea of federation, but that the United States added
an Atlantic element of active republican citizenship that is absent
from Kants formulation.9 The Atlantic element is the republican or
neo-Roman concept of freedom, which involves the civic responsibility to serve the public good through participation yet is adapted to a federal system in which citizens are represented at both the state and federal
orders.10 The United States modification and use of the European idea
served in turn as a norm for some of the non-Indigenous liberal revolutions in Latin America and, to some degree, for the federation of the four
provinces of Canada in the nineteenth century.
In the early twentieth century President Woodrow Wilsons vision of
decolonization, independent state building, and the League of Nations
8

9
10

Kant, Perpetual Peace, 1205, esp. 124. Kant explains this conservative doctrine in The
Metaphysics of Morals, 12933. Under no circumstances can any existing constitutional
order be questioned with regard to obedience. Moreover, like many of the stages
theorists of the eighteenth century, Kant apparently believes that legal order and peaceful
relations only arise with sedentary agriculture and trade in any case, so the Indigenous
peoples who hunt, fish, and herd have no laws and are the most contrary to a civilized
constitution (Perpetual Peace, 122 and note).
Nicolas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For the neo-Roman or republican concept of freedom in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) and Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and
Government (Oxford: Clarendon: 1997). In contrast to this widespread concept of republican or neo-Roman freedom, Kant defines freedom as the privilege not to obey
any external laws except those to which I have been able to give my consent, yet he calls
this republican (Perpetual Peace, 112 and note). It is questionable whether Madison
endorses the republican concept of freedom as nondomination (independence) or the
liberal concept of freedom as noninterference.

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was informed by the Kantian idea. As Carl Friedrich argued in Inevitable

Peace (1948), the idea should be seen to play a normative role in the establishment and governance of the United Nations.11 To come full circle,
Fontana and Pagden surely speak for many when they suggest that the
Union of Europe in our time ought to be viewed in the light of Kants
idea of federalism. David Held sets out his model of cosmopolitan governance for the planet with reference to Kants Perpetual Peace as his
normative standard.12

A CRITICAL ENLIGHTENMENT ATTITUDE TOWARD

THE KANTIAN IDEA OF EUROPE

Is it possible to call this idea of Europe into question and take up a critical
attitude toward aspects of it and the regulative role it plays in political
thought and action without denying its importance? The answer is yes.
Such an attitude has developed in response to the five features of the
Kantian idea over the past two hundred years. A survey of this critical
attitude enables us to see the Kantian idea as a critical ideal rather than as
a regulative idealas one form of organization of the political field among
many rather than as the framework in which alternatives are evaluated.
This attitude is neither anti-Enlightenment nor post-Enlightenment. It is a
critical attitude that derives from the Enlightenment and finds expression,
for example, in Kants essay What is Enlightenment?13 It is a test of the
habitual and regulative assumptions or, more accurately, limits of the
present, including the limits that Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers
claim to have established as beyond doubt. Michel Foucault poses this
critical question: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory,
what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product

11
12
13

Carl J. Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1948).
David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan
Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 22630.
Kant, What is Enlightenment? in Perpetual Peace, 10744. For the Enlightenment context of this essay, see James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century
Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996). For the interpretation of What is Enlightenment? as initiating a form of critical
reflection on the dominant assumptions of the present, including the assumptions of the
Kantian tradition of political philosophy, see Michel Foucault, What is Critique? and
What is Enlightenment? in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York:
Columbia University Press & Semiotext(e), 1997), 2382, 10134; and James Tully,
To Think and Act Differently: Foucaults Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas,
in Foucault contra Habermas: Two Philosophies of the Present, ed. David Owen
(New York: Sage Publications, 1998).

The Kantian Idea of Europe

335

of arbitrary constraints?14 This form of critical reflection on the federal

idea of Europe, therefore, is the application of Kants critical attitude
to one of his own ideas that has become a more or less taken-for-granted
assumption of the present.
The limits of Kants idea of Europe have been called into question by
the practitioners of the Enlightenment attitude of Sapere Aude. Recall
that his idea is presented as marking a transition in European political
self-understanding from Europe as the center of world empires to the
center of a cosmopolitan federation: the creation, in Pagdens words,
of a universal federation bound by common commercial interests.15 It
was not the understanding of Kant and his like-minded contemporaries
that federalism would replace the economic relations and constitutional
forms spread by the wars of European imperialism and colonization but
that independent states and international federalism would be built on
this historical foundation.
Notwithstanding this change in European self-understanding, European imperialism did not decline and federalism did not develop (despite
Kants argument that nature does it herself, whether or not we will it).16
Rather, European imperialism entered into a second and heightened phase
from 1800 to after World War II. Consider, Edward Said writes,
that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 per cent but actually held approximately
35 per cent of the earths surface, and by 1878 the proportion was 67 per cent,
a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had
risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles, and Europe held a grand total of
roughly 85 per cent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was
as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western
metropolis.17

Perpetual Peace played an important role in promoting a form of postcolonial state building and international organization toward the end of
this second and higher stage of imperialism. It is reasonable to question
if it has not also played a role in continuing aspects of imperialism, given
the context in which it was written (of the transition from one phase
of imperialism to another) and the apparently uncritical stance the text
takes to underlying forms of economic and constitutional imperialism.
Now this is exactly the sort of historical and contextual question the
14
15
17

Foucault, What is Enlightenment? 1245.

16 Kant, Perpetual Peace, 123.
Pagden, Lords of all the World, 187.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 8.

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practitioners of the Enlightenment critical attitude, such as Said and homi

k. bhabha, take up.18 Their writings are characterized as postimperial
and postcolonialnot because they believe imperialism is over but because they question the vestiges of imperialism in the received ways of
thinking about and organizing politics, especially where these ways are
presented as nonimperial and the imperial setting of their composition
and dissemination is overlooked.
Whether these efforts [of critique] succeed or fail is a less interesting
matter than what distinguishes them, what makes them possible, writes
Said, a Palestinian-American, in his classic study Culture and Imperialism.
Referring specifically to the United States, he notes
an acute and embarrassed awareness of the all-pervasive, unavoidable imperial
setting. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within
American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind
it), without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. This, I would say, is a
cultural fact of extraordinary political as well as interpretative importance, yet it
has not been recognized as such in cultural and literary theory, and is routinely
circumvented or occluded in cultural discourses. To read most cultural deconstructionists, or Marxists, or new historicists is to read writers whose political horizon,
whose historical location is within a society and culture deeply enmeshed in imperial domination. Yet little notice is taken of this horizon, few acknowledgements
of the setting are advanced, little realization of the imperial closure is allowed for.
Instead, one has the impression that interpretation of other cultures, texts and
peoples . . . occurs in a timeless vacuum, so forgiving and permissive as to deliver
the interpretation directly into a universalism free from attachment, inhibition
and interest.19

Of course, many aspects of the imperial setting of the Kantian idea

economic, military, geographichave been questioned. The aspect I wish
to survey is cultural, what has come to be called cultural imperialism.
Said characterizes it in the following way:
In our time, direct colonialism has largely ended; imperialism . . . lingers where it
has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political,
ideological, economic and social practices. Neither imperialism nor colonialism
is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps
impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain
territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.

Said then offers examples of the vocabulary of nineteenth-century

imperial culture: inferior or subject races, subordinate peoples,
18
19

homi k. bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

Said, Culture and Imperialism, 56.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

337

dependency, expansion, and authority.20 In his view many in the

so-called Western or metropolitan world, as well as their counterparts
in the Third or formerly colonized world, share a sense that the era of
high or classical imperialism, which . . . more or less formally ended with
the dismantling of the great colonial structures after World War Two, has
in one way or another continued to exert considerable cultural influence
in the present. For all sorts of reasons, they feel a new urgency about
understanding the pastness or not of the past, and this urgency is carried
over into perceptions of the present and future.21
The new urgency to understand the imperial horizons of European
texts such as Perpetual Peace and the cultural influence they continue to
exert in the present is a critical response to a central problem raised by
the struggles of decolonization after World War II and, in Eastern Europe,
after 1989. These struggles and their aftermath did not unfold in accord
with what Kant calls the guarantee of perpetual peace: the tendency
to republican constitutions, cosmopolitan federalism, and the acceptance
of the existing economic order. Rather, they gave rise to an acute and
embarrassed awareness of the all-pervasive, unavoidable imperial setting
of these ideas and institutions.
In addition to dismantling the formal features of colonialism, the struggles of liberation aimed to overthrow a form of cultural identity that had
been imposed on the colonized people by the colonizers against their
democratic will and to establish practices of liberty in which they could
invent and discover new identities: first through postcolonial nationalism, then by contesting the imposed dimensions of that national identity,
and finally by establishing practices and institutions of liberty.22 In The
Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon was one of the first to link
decolonization clearly with the struggle against the imposed cultural identity of imperialism and then against the pitfalls of national culture.23 This
struggle against cultural imperialism consists first and foremost, according
20

21
22

23

Ibid., 9. For a very good introduction to the study of cultural imperialism, see John
Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991).
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7.
For this historical sequence of decolonization, see ibid., 23981. For the distinction
between liberation and practices of liberty, see Foucault, The Ethics of Concern for Self
as a Practice of Freedom, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 2823.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1963); note the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. For the status of this text in the Third
World as roughly equivalent to Perpetual Peace in the First World, see Lewis R. Gordon,
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White, eds. Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1996); and Said, Culture and Imperialism, 26778.

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to Fanon, in refusing to imitate precisely the sort of idea expressed in

Perpetual Peace. Let us decide not to imitate Europe, Fanon writes.
We today can do everything so long as we do not imitate Europe, so
long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. If all
the colonized people wish is to turn Africa into a new Europe . . . then
let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know
how to do it better than the most gifted among us.24 The United States,
according to Fanon, provides an example of what happens when former
colonies seek to imitate Europe:
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It
succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which
the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling
dimensions.25

Rather, the task is to create states, institutions, and societies that do

not draw their inspiration from Europe or the United States. Reversing
the stages view of historical development, he concludes that if we want
humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different
level than that which Europe has shown it [humanity], then we must
invent and we must make discoveries.26
Fanons point seems to be that dismantling the formal ties of colonialism through struggles of liberation is a necessary but insufficient condition of liberty. If the people establish a political association modeled
on the European nation-state, these institutions and practices will impose a European cultural identity and so continue imperialism by imitation. To avoid this cultural imperialism and the devastating pathologies
associated with an imposed identity that would linger in the general
cultural sphere, the people must establish institutions and practices of
liberty in which they can experiment with discovering and inventing new
identities.27 By discover and invent I take it that he means that the
people should both draw on indigenous traditions, customs, and ways
and innovate with cultural borrowing and adaptation.
24
25
26

27

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 31213.

Ibid., 313.
Ibid., 315. Fanons argument here that modern Western humanism or the Enlightenment philosophy of Man serves to legitimate the violence of cultural imperialism had
a large influence in Europe as well as in the Third World. Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized
this theme in his Preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Michel Foucault investigated the
extent to which the Enlightenment philosophy of Man plays a role in the processes of
uniform subjectification and identity formation within Europe. See Michel Foucault, Les
Mots et les Choses (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966); idem, Surveiller et Punir (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1975); and idem, What is Enlightenment?
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 20649.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

339

On this account, then, the Kantian idea of free states and federation
is not culturally neutral but is the bearer of processes of a homogenizing or assimilating European cultural identity. Constant saw it this way
as well, as rendering subjects culturally undifferentiated and uniform.
On the contrary, Pagden suggests that many of the proponents of
Kantian European and world federalism from Andrew Fletcher to
Woodrow Wilson saw it as culturally pluralist.28 Those who have struggled to liberate themselves from imperialism over the past forty years have
tended to agree with Constant and Fanon. They have seen their struggles
not only as a means to liberate them from a formal colonial system. They
also struggled for the recognition and accommodation of cultural diversity against forms of cultural imperialism imposed by the very institutions
that Kant took to be cosmopolitan.
Moreover, these struggles over the past forty years did not always
involve the establishment of an independent state through decolonization or secession, although this was common enough from Algeria and
Vietnam to the breakup of the Soviet Union. These struggles for cultural
recognition, as Charles Taylor points out, just as often take place within
existing constitutional states (including within newly decolonized states,
as Fanon predicted), to recognize and accommodate a diversity of cultural
identities either in the shared institutions of unitary political associations,
as in the United States, or through institutions of legal and political pluralism in multi-ethnic and multinational federations and confederations,
as in the European Union.29 These demands are put forward by indigenous peoples; linguistic, religious, and ethnic minorities; nations within
multinational states; and immigrants, exiles, refugees, and multicultural
citizens.30 The aim is not to overturn but to amend the institutions of
constitutional democracy, so they will express the cultural plurality of the
sovereign people, or peoples, rather than impose the dominant cultures
identity while masquerading as universal and difference blind.31 Will
28
29

30
31

Pagden, Lords of all the World, 188.

Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 2575. This collection provides a good
introduction to the politics of recognition or difference. See also Seyla Benhabib,
ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); bhabha, The Location of Culture; and Will Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995). Said traces the connection between decolonization struggles against cultural imperialism in the Third World and the politics of difference in the First World and
Fourth World (Indigenous peoples) in Culture and Imperialism, 191281.
James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 44.

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Kymlicka writes:
Throughout the world, minorities and majorities clash over such issues as language rights, federalism and regional autonomy, political representation, religious freedom, education curriculum, land claims, immigration and naturalization policy, even national symbols such as the choice of national anthem or public
holidays.
Resolving these disputes is perhaps the greatest challenge facing democracies
today. In Eastern Europe and the Third World, attempts to create liberal democratic institutions are being undermined by violent nationalist conflicts. In the
West, volatile disputes over the rights of immigrants, indigenous peoples, and
other cultural minorities are throwing into question many of the assumptions
which have governed political life for decades. Since the end of the Cold War, ethnocultural conflicts have become the most common source of political violence in
the world, and they show no signs of abating.32

Since these struggles against five hundred years of imperialism are only
forty years old, it is too early to say if they will be effective or simply mark
the transition to a third phase of imperialism. Nevertheless, they have
manifestly challenged the purported cultural impartiality and universality
of constitutional states and federations in practice, and the response in
theory has been urgent critical reflection on the imperial setting of
one of the most authoritative regulative ideals, the Kantian idea of Europe.
Three cultural aspects of the Kantian idea in particular have come in
for criticism: the conception of cultures, the relation of cultures to constitutions and federations, and the procedures that render a constitution
impartial and legitimate. I will now survey these criticisms and their relation to the earlier tradition of a critical Enlightenment ethos in order
to show how they give rise to a changed understanding of the idea of
Europe.33
RETHINKING CULTURES

As noted earlier, the fourth feature of the Kantian idea of Europe is a background philosophy of world history. This philosophy of history ties all
five features of the Kantian idea together into a comprehensive worldview.
32
33

Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995), 1.
In order to focus on cultural imperialism, I set aside the important question of whether
Kants idea of federation challenges or legitimates economic imperialism. (The answer
seems obvious enough.) It is worth noting that Kant was aware of and sought to arrest
aspects of military imperialism. See Preliminary Articles 3, 5, and 6, Perpetual Peace,
10810.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

341

In Perpetual Peace and Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, Kant lays out his version of the stages idea of world-historical
development. All societies are located on hierarchically arranged levels of
historical development. Western European nation-states with their emerging republican constitutions, commerce, inchoate federal relations, enlightened self-seeking, competitive motivation of unsocial sociability,
cultivated civilization, and, finally, intimations of a single and universal
culture and morality are closest to the highest stage, yet only halfway there:
We are, to a high degree, cultivated beyond bearing by all manner of social convention and propriety. But we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves
as moral. For the idea of morality belongs to culture; and yet using this idea only in
references to semblances of morality, e.g. love of honour and outward propriety,
constitutes mere civilization.34

All other societies, with their lower political, economic, and cultural
ways, are described and ranked from the standpoint of the European
level. The stage that European societies are approachingof independent
nation-states with republican constitutions and one culture and morality in a federationis universal and cosmopolitan. It is the end-state
to which all others are tending in due course, the level of the development of all the capacities of the human species, and the level of perpetual
peace.35
As the processes of colonial rule and commerce spread around the
globe from the European nations, which will in all likelihood eventually
give laws to all others,36 they stimulate the lower societies to progress
in such a way as to shed their primitive institutions, cultures, and
different kinds of historical faiths, which were appropriate to their
lower stage of development.37 These societies either develop into independent states or become incorporated in the European colonies, which
develop into independent nation-states. Cultures tend to be relative to
the underlying stage of political and economic development. Barbarism
and savagism appear at the inferior, hunter-and-gatherer stage;
civilization and refinement at the superior, commercial stage. The
motive of unsocial sociability, which drives the development of human
34
36
37

Kant, Idea for a Universal History, 36. 35 Ibid., 369 (theses eight and nine).
Ibid., 38.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 125 note. For Kant there is no religious or moral pluralism. There
is only one religion (and one morality) valid for all men in all times. The variety of
faiths historically can be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can
only thereby be different in different times and places.

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capacities through individual competition for honor, power, or property,

to secure status among his fellows, appears to emerge at the transition
from shepherding to agriculture and initiates the first true steps from
barbarism to culture. Kant continues:
Without those characteristics of unsociability . . . man would live as an Arcadian
shepherd, in perfect concord, contentment and mutual love, and all talents would
lie eternally dormant in their seed; men docile as the sheep they tend would hardly
invest their existence in any worth greater than that of cattle; and as to the purpose
behind mans creation, his rational nature, there would remain a void.38

Antagonisms among competitive individuals within crude political organizations have the unintended consequence of constructing the foundations of a perfect civil constitution. In the same way the antagonism of
war among political organizations leads unintentionally to the development of federations:
Through wars, through excessive and never remitting preparation for war, through
the resultant distress that every nation must, even during times of peace, feel within
itself . . . [men] are driven to make some initial, imperfect attempts; finally, after
much devastation, upheaval, and even complete exhaustion of their inner powers,
they are driven to take the step that reason could have suggested, even without
so much sad experience, namely, to leave the lawless state of savagery and enter
into a federation of peoples.39

This course of improvement can be discerned first in the history of

the constitutions of the nations on our continent from the Greeks to
the present, and then used as a guiding thread to clarify and predict the
the national histories of other peoples.40 The reason why the process
began in Europe, spread from Europe, and will reach its goal first in
Europe is the superiority of the national characteristics of Europeans
over other races:
The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part,
has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his
passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why
at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them
with weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan,
38
39

40

Kant, Idea for a Universal History, 32.

Ibid., 34. Compare Perpetual Peace, 121. The lawless state of savagery underlined in
the quotation refers to international relations but also to the hunter, gatherer, and fisher
stage of development (Perpetual Peace, 122 and note).
Ibid., 38.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

343

the Turks, Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbuss discoveries, they have all
amazed the southern lands with their arts and weapons.41

This worldview is, as Said explained, the vocabulary of classic

nineteenth-century imperial culture. It is imperial in three senses of
this polysemic word. It ranks all non-European cultures as inferior or
lower from the point of view of the presumed direction of European
civilization toward the universal culture. It legitimates European imperialism, not in the sense of being right (which Kant roundly denies) but
in the sense that it coincides with nature and history and the precondition of an eventual just national and world order. Finally, it is imposed on
non-European peoples as their cultural self-understanding in the course of
European imperialism and federalism. Fanons patriotic plea to the Third
World to avoid the imitation of Europe is presumably directed at all three
senses. Decolonized peoples must not fall into the comprehensive identity
given by this scheme and thereby continue imperialism by other means of
dependency. They must refuse it by exploring alternatives and so become
independent.
The first challenge to Kants idea came from one of his former students,
J. G. von Herder (17441803). In Ideas on the Philosophy of the History
of Mankind (178491), Herder defended cultural pluralism.42 He argued
that each culture contains its own unique and incommensurable truth
or worth, and as such could not be subordinated or elevated as inferior
or superior to another.43 Kant reviewed Herders work and reasserted
his view that all cultures can be ranked relative to a developmental logic
and a normative apex. In a particularly revealing passage of the review
(which reasserts the thesis of the Idea for a Universal History), Kant asks

41

42

43

Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997),
64. Kant wrote this in 1764, twenty years before the Idea for a Universal History. However, nothing in the latter text (or in Perpetual Peace) repudiates or contradicts his earlier
view on national characteristics. The whole tenor of the text is complementary to it (see
especially 389). He also continued to write on the racial superiority of Europeans in
1775 (On the Different Races of Men) and 1798 (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point
of View). For an introduction to Kants views on race and national characteristics, see
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 19, 3870.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie de Geschichte der Menschheit (178491),
translated in part as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind, trans. T. Churchill
(New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800).
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 65. Compare Charles Taylor, The Importance of
Herder, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 7999.

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rhetorically:
Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited
by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for
thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the
question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been
just as good if the island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy
human beings who merely enjoy themselves?44

Herders work challenges two features of the Kantian idea: the presupposition that all cultures can be ranked relative to a European norm
and that they all develop (once they come into contact with the more
civilized nations) toward that apex. Herder also presents an alternative
attitude of cosmopolitanism as cultural pluralism: the presumption that
all cultures are of intrinsic worth and that they have their own histories. In
the long term Herders cultural pluralism called into question the attitude
of European cultural superiority informing the Kantian idea and helped
to foster an outlook of cultural pluralism. This outlook is expressed in
early-twentieth-century anthropology, the respect for non-European cultures that began to emerge during decolonization, and the more recent
demands of multiculturalism. As Taylor suggests, the demands of multiculturalism rest on the premise derived from Herder that we owe
equal respect to all cultures. This is understood as a presumption that
cultures are of equal worth:
it is a starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the study of another
culture. The validity of the claim has to be demonstrated concretely in the actual
study of the culture.45

Notwithstanding, Herder did not question another feature of the stages

view of cultures and constitutions: the idea that each nation has one culture and that it is independent, separate, and internally uniform. Indeed,
Herder may be said to have put the idea of a national culture on a new and
influential footing. The more recent critics of cultural imperialism have
accepted Herders presumption but challenged his billiard-ball picture
of cultures. They have argued that the culturally complex character of decolonizing and First World nations, the tangled and overlapping struggles
for cultural recognition in all societies today (mentioned by Kymlicka),
as well as the history of cultural interaction and suppression, suggest that
44

45

Kant, Review of Herders Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in Kants
Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), cited in Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 70.
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 667.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

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cultures are not independent, separate, and internally uniform but overlapping, interacting, and internally contested or negotiated. Moreover,
the multiplicity of cultures does not seem to bear any straightforward
relation to constitutional and economic development or to tend to convergence and uniformity. Quite the opposite.46
Consequently, cultures should be seen, in the words of Said, as contrapuntal ensembles.47 The overlapping, interacting, and internally negotiated character of cultures is expressed as a second presumption
of cultural diversity rather than Herders pluralism or Kants monism.
Reflecting on the cultural diversity and demands for recognition within
the emerging European Union, Jacques Derrida writes that, contrary to
both Kant and Herder, what is proper to a culture is not to be identical
to itself. This is not to say that cultural identity is not important or not
to not have an identity but to be able to take the form of a subject only
in the difference with itself. There is, Derrida suggests, no culture or
cultural identity without this difference with itself.48 This second presumption is, like the first, a working hypothesis, an attitude one takes to
culture, not a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. When
approaching a culture or any demand for the acknowledgment of a culture, one should ask three questions. Are there other cultures or, recalling
Fanon, other activities of cultural discovery and invention that share the
same geographic space and deserve mutual presumptive respect? Is the
culture in question constituted temporally by interaction with other cultures? Are there others who share the culture in question yet contest the
way it is articulated and expressed by spokespersons claiming to speak
for all?49
What are the differences between the attitude toward cultures in the
two presumptions of cultural diversity and in Kants idea of Europe? The
first and most obvious difference is the attitude of presumptive respect
for cultural differences in contrast to the presupposed attitude of cultural
superiority (of Europeans). The second presumption suggests that a citizen or a people will be the bearer of more than one culture, of multiple
46

47
48
49

For Herders view that cultures are separate and incommensurable, see Anthony Pagden,
European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993),
17281. The change in the understanding of cultures as overlapping, interacting, and
internally negotiated is summarized in Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures:
Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
1233.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 52.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael R. Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 9.
For these three questions, see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 129.

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cultural identities, and that this diversity is better approached as activities of cultural discovery, invention, reimagination, and contestation in
agonic relation to the powers of cultural imposition and assimilation
than as a diversity of fixed cultural formationsmore Dionysian than
Appollonian.50
The third difference is the understanding that culture is closely related
to identity. Kant understood this as well, but he saw cultural identity, except at the highest stage, as something superficial and irrelevant to ones
identity as a citizen. Ones identity as a citizen is defined in the First
Definitive Article in terms of a metaphysical and universal theoretical
identity, toward which the species is tending, of autonomy: the capacity of rational agents to direct their lives reflectively in accordance with
universal principles. In contrast, cultural identity is seen as an important aspect of ones practical identity. The appropriate acknowledgment of and respect for ones practical identity is now seen as relevant
to ones identity as a citizen. Practical identity refers to the aspects of
citizens identities that matter to them. It is the answer to the question
Who are we? or the structure of strong evaluations in accord with,
and against, which humans live their lives.51 In an influential and representative analysis, Christine Korsgaard describes practical identity in the
following way:
The conception of ones identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view
about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which
you find your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. . . . Practical
identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of
such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a
certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession,
someones lover or friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons
and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations
spring from what that identity forbids.52
50

51

52

For one important attempt to work out the implications of this second difference,
see William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1995).
For these ways of characterizing practical identity, see Michel Foucault, The Subject
and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21013;
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3101; and David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge,
1994), 64216.
Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 101.

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347

Fourth, the awareness that the jumble of cultural aspects that make up
ones practical identity matter to ones sense of self-worth has led to the
argument that these cultural aspects require a level of mutual respect in
ones society in order to live the sort of life of self-directed agency presupposed by Kant. John Rawls forcefully argues that self-respect must be
seen as a primary good of a liberal society; self-respect requires a threshold of mutual acknowledgment and respect of citizens practical identities
(or practices of identity formation and reformation).53 Forms of cultural
disrespect (such as racism, sexism, or the a priori ranking of citizens
cultures as superior or inferior in the Kantian scheme) and misrecognition and nonrecognition of cultural differences (such as the suppression
and assimilation of minority cultures and languages) are serious forms
of oppression and injustice, Anthony Laden argues. They undermine the
conditions of self-respect required for free and equal citizenship.54
These four differences mark the fairly widespread transition from and
repudiation of the conception of cultures in the Kantian idea of Europe to
the recognition of the problem of cultural imperialism and the exploration
of the two presumptions of cultural diversity, not only between the socalled First and Third Worlds, but within European and North Atlantic
societies themselves. This change in outlook is in part the achievement
of the critical Enlightenment attitude and, in particular, Fanons contribution to it. Nevertheless, one could agree that this is a change in the
understanding of cultures from Kants idea of Europe but deny that it
entails any change in what is essential to the Kantian idea: the concepts
of constitutions and federations. It is to this that we now turn.
RETHINKING CONSTITUTIONS AND FEDERATIONS

Recall that on Kants account the constitution of every free and independent nation-state should be the same. The constitution is republican, and
this means that it treats each citizen the same, as free and equal. Rightful equality, Kant explains, is that relation among citizens whereby no
citizen can be bound by a law, unless all are subject to it simultaneously
and in the very same way. 55 This idea of equality gives expression
to the principle that all humans are equally worthy of respect because
53
54

55

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 4401.
See the important thesis by Anthony Simon Laden, Constructing Shared Wills: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity, Ph.D. diss., Department of Philosophy,
Harvard University, 1996.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 112, note.

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of their status as rational agents with the capacity for autonomy. To recognize citizens are equals in this sense involves treating them impartially
(in the very same way) and, so Kant thought, in a difference-blind
manner. It is standardly expressed in individual rights and duties, formal
equality before the law, and the principle of nondiscrimination. The upshot of the change in the understanding of cultures is the recognition that
humans ought to be respected as equals in their capacity to form, contest,
and transform practical identities or identity-related cultural differences
as individuals and as members of cultural groups. However, the presumption of the equal recognition and respect for cultural differences, which,
as we have seen, seems to follow from recognition of the equal capacity to
form such cultural differences, comes into conflict with the presumption
of equality as impartiality or difference-blindness, which seems to follow
from the equal capacity for autonomy. The tension between these two
kinds of equality of respect and recognition, which are both equally well
grounded in the values of modern politics, can be formulated in different
ways.56
The first and most Kantian resolution is to argue that the recognition
and respect for cultural differences take place outside the political realm
in the realm of ethics and self-esteem, whereas citizens are recognized and accorded respect solely under the description of impartial
equality: that is, as bearers of identical rights and duties.57 It is certainly
true that many cultural differences and forms of multiculturalism can
be treated fairly in this way. Citizens can express and contest many aspects of their practical identities while exercising the rights and duties of
impartial equality and fight against various forms of cultural imposition
and disrespect by the application of the principle of nondiscrimination,
as Jeremy Waldron has asserted.58
However, there are many cases where the two aspects of equality cannot be separated into two mutually exclusive categories, where the equal
recognition and respect for cultural differences involve some conflict with

56

57

58

For this formulation of the debate between Kantians and their critics as a question of the
relation between two kinds or aspects of equality of recognition and respect, rather than
as equality versus difference, see Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 413.

This is the response associated with Jurgen

Habermas in, for example, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). For an historical account from Kant to the present,
see Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts,
trans. Joel Anderson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995).
Jeremy Waldron, Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative, The Rights of
Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka, 93122.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

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the Kantian idea of a constitution based solely on impartial equality.

Taylor neatly summarizes the conflict:
These two modes of politics, then, both based on the notion of equal respect,
come into conflict. For one, the principle of equal respect requires that we treat
people in a difference-blind fashion. The fundamental intuition that humans
command this respect focuses on what is the same in all. For the other, we
have to recognize and even foster particularity. The reproach the first makes
to the second is just that it violates the principle of nondiscrimination. The reproach the second makes to the first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them. This would be bad
enough if the mold were itself neutralnobodys mold in particular. But the
complaint generally goes further. The claim is that the supposedly neutral set
of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture. As it turns out, then, only the minority or the
suppressed cultures are being forced to take alien form. Consequently, the supposedly fair and difference-blind society is not only inhuman (by suppressing identities) but also, in a subtle and unconsciousness way, itself highly
discriminatory.59

Such conflicts comprise one of the central problems of the present (as
the preceding quotation from Kymlicka highlights). Yet it is difficult to
formulate in the terms of the Kantian idea of Europe. As a result, the
Kantian idea of a constitution and a federation has been amended in two
types of cases.
John Stuart Mill was one of the first to suggest how. He argued that
the a priori presumption should remain in favor of impartiality, and
the law should treat all alike except where dissimilarity of treatment
is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy.60 In the
first type of case, citizens reason that they cannot exercise the rights and
duties of impartial equality (and so participate in the public and private
life of their constitutional association without injustice) unless they are
allowed to exercise them in ways that recognize and accommodate, rather
than misrecognize and denigrate, their cultural differences. The relevant
cultural difference may be linguistic, religious, gender-related, ethnic, and
so on. This is a challenge, not to the shared rights, duties, and institutions
59
60

Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 43.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in his Three Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 4289. In Mills view, no reasons (of justice or policy) advanced
to treat women dissimilarly by subordinating them to men are convincing. Nevertheless,
he introduces the proviso that impartial equality can be amended if reasons for dissimilar
treatment of some citizens that does not involve subordination can be made good. This
is precisely what recent feminists, building on Mill, have argued, for purported impartial
public norms often embody a male norm.

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associated with impartial equality but to the requirement that all exercise
them always in the very same way.
The positive reasons advanced for this dissimilarity of treatment
often appeal to the very value of impartial equality that was thought to
entail difference-blindness. If, under the rubric of impartial equality, a
constitution upholds one public language, statutory holidays that coincide with one religion, public practices that uphold a male norm, public
education that upholds one historical narrative, and so on, then the constitution, while treating everyone in the very same way, does not treat
them impartially. It is partial to, and serves to impose, one culture and
subordinates and assimilates all others to some extent. To be impartial
the constitution cannot be difference-blind, which is impossible in these
cases, or difference-partial, as it is by upholding one set of dominant cultural differences while pretending to be impartial. Rather, the constitution
must be difference-aware or diversity-aware: that is, it must accord equal
due recognition and respect, in some way, to the respectworthy cultural
differences of all citizens. This is the same structure of argument against
cultural imperialism we saw earlier with Constant and Fanon, but now it
is advanced by the culturally diverse citizens of contemporary societies.
Alternatively, as Kymlicka has argued, the due recognition of the cultural
differences of citizens is a necessary condition of the capacity for autonomy, something impartial equality is meant to secure. In these and other
ways, the idea of a constitution in the Kantian idea has been modified
from within to include, as a matter of justice, the equality of respect for
cultural diversity.61
The second and stronger type of case is where citizens reason that the
equal recognition and respect of their cultural identities require different
institutions of self-government: that is, forms of legal and political pluralism that accord with cultural differences by means of devices of subsidiarity, devolution, regional autonomy, federalism, and confederalism within
a larger constitutional association. This demand conflicts with another
principle of a republican constitution according to Kantthe principle
of the dependence of everyone on a single, common [source of] legislation (as subjects).62 In multi-ethnic and multinational constitutional
associations, the positive reasons for this second type of dissimilarity of
61

62

The literature is vast. See, for example, Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism; Will Kymlicka,
Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Kymlicka,
Multiculturalism. In this and the second type and case, I set aside arguments that appeal
to the equal respect for cultural differences as a value in its own right.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 112.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

351

treatment have been similar to those advanced by Constant immediately

after the publication of Perpetual Peace, or they have been analogous to
the ones advanced in the first type of case: that participation in the same
legislative body in all matters would involve some degree of cultural imperialism. The consequence is that citizens are dependent on more than
one common source of legislation (regional, provincial, national, federal)
and the powers of these legislative assemblies are not ordered in a single
hierarchy. The resulting form of federalism differs from Kants idea of
federalism: it can occur within as well as among constitutional associations, and it is based on the recognition and respect of cultural diversity
rather than on cultural uniformity.63
One of the best examples of the two cases (diverse constitutionalism
and federalism) is arguably the very organization that was supposed to
unfold in accord with the Kantian idea, the European Union. Another
example that exposes the limitations of Kantian constitutionalism and
federalism is the demand of the Indigenous peoples of the world to free
themselves from the internal colonialism imposed on them over the past
five hundred years by the former colonies of European imperialism and
to govern themselves in their own constitutional associations. As we have
seen, the Kantian idea locates these peoples at the lowest (hunting-andgathering) stage without laws and property and (as in all cases) without
a right to challenge the system of laws imposed on them by the European
settler states:
A people should not inquire with any practical aim in view into the origin of the
supreme authority to which it is subject, that is, a subject ought not to rationalize
for the sake of action about the origin of this authority, as a right that can still be
called into question [ius controversum] with regard to the obedience he owes it.
For, since a people must be regarded as already united under a general legislative
will in order to judge with rightful force about the supreme authority, it cannot
and may not judge otherwise than as the present head of state wills it to. Whether a
state began with an actual contract of submission as a fact, or whether power came
first and law arrived only afterward, or even whether they should have followed
in this order: For a people already subject to civil law these rationalizations are
altogether pointless and, moreover, threaten a state with danger.64

63

64

For the European Union, see Richard Bellamy, The Constitution of Europe: Rights
or Democracy, in Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe, ed.
Richard Bellamy (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1996), 15373. The literature on
this second type of case is also vast. See Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures
and Multicultural Citizenship; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Laden, Constructing Shared Wills.
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 12930.

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J AMES T ULLY

Once this is settled, Aboriginal peoples have no appeal for the recognition
and protection of their cultures and Aboriginal rights. As we have seen,
they face assimilation under the Kantian idea of equality, which decrees
their subjection to non-Aboriginal legislative authority in the very same
way as every other citizen.
Of course, this dimension of the Kantian idea has always been contested
by Aboriginal peoples, and they continue to challenge it in the courts and
legislatures of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand,
and in international law today.65 In addition, it was forcefully challenged
from within the Enlightenment tradition of constitutionalism by John
Marshall, chief justice of the United States, in the early nineteenth century. Like Herder, he repudiated the stages view on which it is based
and reasoned that Aboriginal peoples should be recognized and respected
as equal: that is, as self-governing nations, equal in juridical status to
European nations.
As Marshall wrote in Worcester v. the State of Georgia (1832): America,
separated from Europe by a wide ocean, was inhabited by a distinct people, divided into separate nations, independent of each other and the rest
of the world, having institutions of their own, and governing themselves
by their own laws.66 Marshall goes on to conclude that the just establishment of non-Aboriginal constitutional states in America requires the
consent of the Aboriginal nations acquired through nation-to-nation
treaties. His opinion gives rise to a treaty-based federalism between selfgoverning, co-existing Aboriginal nations and the American (and Canadian) governments.67
Thus two central features of Kantian constitutionalism and federalism
are abandoned: the difference-blind application of his principle of equality and the principle of citizens dependence on a single, common source
of legislation. Aboriginal peoples are dependent first and foremost on
their own legislation, and the source of this legislative authority is not the
United States or the Canadian constitution, but the Aboriginal peoples
themselves as self-governing nations prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Moreover, this line of argument has been extended to question the underlying Eurocentric direction of constitutional and federal development
65
66

67

See The Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 5 vols.
(Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1996), esp. vols. 1 and 2.
Chief Justice John Marshalls opinion in Worcester v. the State of Georgia, reprinted
in The Writings of Chief Justice Marshall on the Federal Constitution (Boston: James
Monroe and Co., 1839), 4267.
Ibid., 435, 445. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 11738.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

353

in Kants framework. A number of scholars have argued that the federation of the United States was influenced not only by European and
Atlantic ideas of federalism but also by the federation of the five Iroquois
nations. Others have suggested that Iroquois federation and its constitution, The Great Law of Peace, is a better heuristic for global federalism
than the Kantian idea precisely because it respects and recognizes cultural
diversity.68
FROM MONOLOGUE TO COSMOPOLITAN MULTILOGUE

The Enlightenment critical attitude toward the problem of cultural imperialism modified all five features of the Kantian idea of Europe and the
world. However, recall the line of argument. Two presumptions regarding the equality of respect for cultures gave rise to three questions and four
differences with respect to Kants understanding of cultures. It followed
from these presumptions, questions, and differences that Kants ideas of
constitutions and federations should be amended, specifically the ideas
that equality always entails difference-blind treatment and that there must
be one locus of authority in a constitutional association. These amendments led to the justification of two non-Kantian types of cases: where
citizens share the same rights and institutions yet exercise and participate
in them in different ways (diverse constitutionalism) and where citizens
require a plurality of legal and political institutions (diverse federalism) in
order to accord equal respect to the diversity of their cultural similarities
and differences.
These rather dramatic changes in the understanding of the principles
and practices of constitutions and federations rest entirely on two presumptions that the cultural differences in question are worthy of respect.
The changes should be accepted if and only if the two presumptions can
be made good. We have assumed this for the sake of the argument, but
the point of describing them as presumptions is precisely to flag that
68

Robert W. Venables, American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding Fathers, Exiled in the Land of the Free, ed. Oren Lyons (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers,
1992), 73124; Jose Barriero, ed., Indian Roots of American Democracy (Ithaca: Aewkon
and Cornell University Press, 1988); and Iris Marion Young, Hybrid Democracy:
Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project, in Aboriginal Rights, Political Theory and Reshaping Institutions, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a careful treatment of the demands
for recognition of Aboriginal peoples and the principles of liberal democracy, see Michael
Murphy, Nation, Culture and Authority: Multinational Democracies and the Politics
of Pluralism, Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, McGill University, January
1998.

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J AMES T ULLY

they are open to question. So how is it to be decided if a presumption

of equal respectworthiness for identity-related cultural difference is valid,
and, if it is, what kind of constitutional or federal recognition is due?
The answer to this question marks the final and most important change
in understanding of constitutions and federations brought about by the
Enlightenment critical attitude.
Kants answer is that he decides. First, he judged the relative worth
of the cultures of the world and ranked them relative to his background
Eurocentric philosophy of history. Second, he determined the corresponding essentials for all legitimate constitutions and federations (by means of
his transcendental principle of publicness that functions like the test of
universalization and noncontradiction in morality).69 The very idea that
the question can be answered in this way, monologically and comprehensively, is now challenged as yet another dogma of cultural imperialism.
Take first the question of the validity of the presumption of equal value
of a culture or cultural difference. A necessary condition of reaching an
impartial answer is that we enter into dialogue with members of the culture in question. Drawing again on Herder and the tradition of cultural
hermeneutics that developed in part from his work, Taylor explains why
cross-cultural dialogue is necessary:
we may have only the foggiest idea ex ante of in what its valuable contribution
might consist. Because, for a sufficiently different culture, the very understanding
of what it is to be of worth will be strange and unfamiliar to us. We learn [by
dialogue] to move in a broader horizon, within which what we have formerly
taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the different background of the formerly unfamiliar cultures.
The fusion of horizons operates through our developing new vocabularies of
comparison, by means of which we can articulate these contrasts. So that if and
when we ultimately find substantive support for our initial presumption, it is on
the basis of an understanding of what constitutes worth that we couldnt possibly
have had at the beginning.70

If Kant had entered into dialogue with members of the cultures he ranked
monologically, he could have broadened his horizons and seen the idea
for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent as one background
of valuation among many. He could have entered into the difficult but
rewarding activity of comparing the worth and public respectworthiness
69
70

Kant, On the Agreement between Politics and Morality according to the Transcendental
Concept of Public Right, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 12530.
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 67.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

355

of European and non-European cultures and their internal diversity in

a genuinely cosmopolitan way. This activity could change not only his
understanding of other cultures but also his idea of Europe itself.71
Citizens are required to accord the appropriate mutual respect to each
others respectworthy cultural differences (for the reasons given above
by Rawls). Therefore, it follows that citizens must engage in this kind
of intercultural and agonic dialogue. Given the need to test the second
presumption of cultural diversity in the course of the dialogue (by asking
the three questions), the dialogue is properly called a multilogue. Such
a public multilogue can be thought of as a reformulation of Kants ideal of
public enlightenment in the face of cultural diversity. The persons who
decide the second part of the question (the kind of constitutional or federal
recognition that is due) must engage in the multilogue to determine which
cultural differences are candidates for constitutional recognition (that is,
are worthy of respect). Yet must all citizens reach agreement on the second
part of the question, or can it be decided by a few? The answer given by
Kant is that a few can decide questions of constitutional essentials as long
as their reasons are compatible with their being made public (the test
of public reason), and citizens on individual reflection are able to give
their consent (the test of external freedom).72
However, this monological feature of Kantian constitutionalism and
federalism has been challenged from within the Kantian tradition by John

Rawls and Jurgen

Habermas. Both argue that Kants monological test of
public reason and external freedom is insufficient to ensure impartiality
and justification. It is through an actual dialogue in which equal citizens
exchange public reasons to reach agreement on constitutional essentials,
Habermas explains in contrast to Kant, that partialities can be exposed
and overcome, and the form of consent required for public justification
can be achieved.73 The dialogical reformulation of the demands of an
71

72
73

For the logic of this kind of intercultural and agonic multilogue, see James Tully, Diversitys Gambit Declined, Constitutional Predicament: Canada after the Referendum of
1992, ed. Curtis Cook (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 1994), 14999; and
Laden, Constructing Shared Wills, 2608.
Kant, On the Agreement between Politics and Morality, 125; and idem, Perpetual
Peace, 112 note.

Habermas, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical JustiSee Jurgen

fication, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and
S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 43116; John Rawls, Political

Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Jurgen

Habermas, Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason; and John Rawls, Reply to Habermas,
Journal of Philosophy 92, 3 (March 1995): 10931, 13280.

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J AMES T ULLY

ideal of public reason and freedom is presented by Habermas in terms of

principle D: Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could
meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in
a practical discourse.74
Since citizens begin the public discussion on constitutional essentials
from within their various cultural understandings, the two questions (the
respectworthiness of citizens cultural differences and their appropriate
form of recognition) are raised and addressed in the same practical discourse:
The descriptive terms in which each individual perceives his interests must be open
to criticism by others. Needs and wants are interpreted in the light of cultural
values. Since cultural values are always components of intersubjectively shared
traditions, the revision of the values used to interpret needs and wants cannot be
a matter for individuals to handle monologically.75

This change in the understanding of constitutionalism can be seen as

a reformulation of the ideal of public reason in order to place the constitutional rule of law on equal footing with the democratic idea of the
sovereignty of the people who impose the constitution on themselves. The
thesis that the rule of law and democracy (or self-rule) are co-equal principles, associated in European theory with Locke and Rousseau, became
widely accepted in the twentieth century despite Kants objections to it.
A constitution or a federation rests on the agreement of the sovereign
people reached through processes of deliberation or what is now called
democratic constitutionalism.76 A cultural difference is worthy of respect and some form of recognition if it can be shown to be reasonable.
It is reasonable if through the exchange of public reasons among free
and equal citizens the cultural difference in question can be made good
to citizens generally. In the exchange of public reasons, citizens accept
the burdens of judgment associated with freedom and equality in conditions of cultural diversity or reasonable pluralism: the awareness of and
74

75
76

Jurgen
Habermas, Discourse Ethics, 66. The role of dialogue in overcoming partiality and securing consent based on conviction is mentioned on pages 667. Habermas
interprets Rawlss theory here as monological like Kants. Rawls corrects him on this in
Reply to Habermas and clarifies his own conception of public dialogue on constitutional essentials.
Habermas, Discourse Ethics, 678.
See Habermas, Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason, 12631; Rawls,
Reply to Habermas, 1617; and Habermas, Popular Sovereignty as Procedure, in
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy,
trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 46390. For Kants objection
that popular sovereignty is self-contradictory, see Metaphysics of Morals, 130.

The Kantian Idea of Europe

357

respect for those identity-related cultural differences that are compatible

with reaching agreement on a shared identity as citizens.77
The changed understanding of constitutionalism, Laden explains, is a
matter of rejecting that a conception of citizenship is worked out ahead of
time based on supposedly universal principles and then arguing that
any identities with non-political aspects which are incompatible with this
notion of citizenship are unreasonable. Nor can one argue that complaints about the burdensomeness of citizenship from their perspectives
are illegitimate charges of injustice. Laden starts, not from a conception
of citizenship, but from an ideal of society ordered by a shared will formed
through a process of reasonable political deliberation. He continues:
The realization of that ideal involves members of the society coming to construct
a political identity they can share despite their other differences. We call that
identity citizenship, and try to work out some of its basic features given the role
it plays in securing the possibility that deliberation could construct such a shared
will. Freedom and equality come in to its characterization in this fashion.78

In his early presentation of principle D, Habermas appeared to hold

that cultural differences would be filtered out in the course of the dialogue
by processes of generalization and role-taking and that citizens would
reach agreement on a difference-blind constitution.79 However, as the critical response to Habermas has shown, this reintroduction of differenceblind equality as the regulative ideal of discourse cannot be sustained. If
citizens take into account the culturally different or concrete other, as
well as the generalized other, in the course of their deliberation, as they
must, then there is no reason in principle why they cannot give good public
reasons for the respect for and public recognition of those differences in
diverse forms of constitutions and federations: reasons that are not particular to the members of that culture but are based on considerations of justice, freedom, equality, and nonsubordination that are shared by citizens
generally.80 Furthermore, as Iris Marion Young has gone on to argue, if
77

78
79

80

This paragraph is a rough description of the transformation of Kants ideal of public

reason to bring it in line with Rawls in Political Liberalism and Laden in Constructing
Shared Wills. For situations in which equality (in both senses) is challenged, see Rawls,
The Law of Peoples, in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed.
Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 4182.
Laden, Constructing Shared Wills, 3389.
Habermas appears to modify his earlier view to some extent, perhaps in response to the
critical literature. See Habermas, Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State, Multiculturalism, 10749, and Citizenship and National Identity, in
Facts and Norms, 491516.
See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992), 14877.

358

J AMES T ULLY

citizens are to treat each other equally in the discussion itself, they will
have to recognize that Habermass form of public argumentation is not
impartial but culturally particular and thus accept culturally different
forms of argumentation. In these and other ways the imperial aspects of
the early formulation of principle D have been exposed and corrected.
A postimperial and genuinely cosmopolitan conception of the critical exchange of public reasons among free and equal citizens can then become
the basis of constitutionalism and federalism.81
CONCLUSION

The Kantian idea of Europe and the world is not as cosmopolitan as Kant
intended it to be. His conceptions of cultures, constitutions, and federations, as well as the procedures of constitutional legitimation, are partial
in one way or another, and as a result they continue cultural imperialism
when they are treated as if they were universal. My critical survey was
not restricted to this negative, Socratic task of showing that Kants idea of
Europe and the world does not possess the cosmopolitan status it intends
to possess. The Enlightenment critical attitude is often criticized for being
only negative, for failing to put forward an alternative. In response to this
objection, I sought to show how a different way of thinking about and
acting in relation to the cultures, constitutions, and federations of Europe
and the world has been developed in the course of the two hundred years
of criticism. This way of thinking and acting appears to be less imperial
and more cosmopolitan, and perhaps more peaceful, than the Kantian
idea that it simultaneously respects and challenges.82
81
82

Iris Marion Young, Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,
in Democracy and Difference, 12035.
This attitude of both respecting and challenging the prevailing forms of thought and
action in the present is the Enlightenment critical attitude. See Foucault, What is Enlightenment? 41.

Contributors

TALAL ASAD teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York. He was born in Saudi Arabia, spent his boyhood in India and Pakistan,
and was educated in Britain where he has lived for most of his life. His most recent
book is entitled Genealogies of Religion (1993).
ANDRE S DE BLAS GUERRERO is Professor of Theory of the State and Chairman of the
Department of Political Science and Administration of the Universidad Nacional

a Distancia in Madrid. His most recent publications are Tradicion

de Educacion
(1991) and Nacionalismos y naciones en
republicana y nacionalismo espanol
Europa (1994).
HANS W. BLOM teaches social and political philosophy at Erasmus University,
Rotterdam. His recent books include Causality and Morality in Politics: The Rise
of Naturalism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (1995) and, as
editor, Algernon Sidneys Court Maxims (1996). He is currently working on editions of texts by Pieter de la Court and Lambertus van Velthuysen. He is acting
editor of the series Studies in the History of Ideas in the Low Countries and editor
of Grotiana.

ARIANE CHEBEL DAPPOLLONIA is matre de conferences at the Institut dEtudes

de la Vie
Politiques in Paris. She also is associate researcher at the Centre dEtude
Politique Francaise (CEVIPOF) and executive director of the American Center/
Sciences Po. She has published widely on the politics of European integration and
on the history of the Right in Europe. Her most recent publication is Les racismes
ordinaires (1998).
ELIE COHEN is Director of Research at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific

Research) and Professor at the Institut dEtudes

Politiques in Paris. He is a member
of the Council of Economic Advisers at the Office of the French Prime Minister,
359

360

Contributors

Vice President at the Haut Conseil du secteur public, scientific adviser to the
European Union Cost Program, and a former member of the Board of Directors

of France Telecom. His books include LEtat

brancardier: Politiques du declin industriel 19741984 (1989), Le Colbertisme High-Tech: Economie des Telecom
et du grand project (1992), La Tentation hexagonale: La Souverainete a` lepreuve
de la mondialisation (1996), and most recently, LOrdre Economique Mondial:
Essai sur les authorites de regulation (2001).
DANIELA ENGELMANN-MARTIN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social
and Political Science of the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
BIANCAMARIA FONTANA is Professor of the History of Political Ideas at the Institut

dEtudes
Politiques et Internationales of the University of Lausanne. Her books
include Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society (1985), Benjamin Constant
and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (1991), and Politique de Laclos (1996). She is
also the editor and translator of Benjamin Constant, Political Writings (1988).
MICHAEL HERZFELD is Professor of Anthropology, and Curator of European
Ethnology in the Peabody Museum, at Harvard University. A past president of
both the Modern Greek Studies Association and the Society for the Anthropology
of Europe, he has also served as editor of American Ethnologist. He is the author
of a large number of books on the anthropology of Europe, the most recent of
which are The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots
of Western Bureaucracy (1992), Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the NationState (1997), and Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography
of Andreas Nenedakis (1997).
WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN is Professor of History at Princeton University and
former Executive Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. His most recent book is The Great Famine: Northern Europe
in the Early Fourteenth Century (1996). He is currently at work on a book on
Europe from 1000 to 1350 to be published by Penguin Books.

WILFRIED NIPPEL is Professor of Ancient History at the Humboldt Universitat

Berlin. He has also held positions at the universities of Cologne, Basel, Bochum,
Munich, and Bielefeld. He has written widely on the political and social history of
antiquity and ancient political theory and on the history of classical scholarship.
His most recent publications include Griechen, Barbaren und Wilde (1990),
Public Order in Ancient Rome (1995), and, as editor, Max Webers Wirtschaft
and Gesellschaft, Teilband 5: Die Stadt (1999).
ANTHONY PAGDEN is Harry C. Black Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins
University. Until recently he was Reader in Modern Intellectual History at
Cambridge University. He has held visiting positions at the European University

Contributors

361

Institute (Florence), Harvard University, The Institute for Advanced Study at

Princeton UNED (Madrid), and the Centre for European Cultural Studies at
Aarhus (Denmark). His most recent publications are Lords of all the World:
y
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (1995) and La Ilustracion
sus enemigos: dos ensayos sobre los origenes de la modernidad (2001).
LUISA PASSERINI is Professor of History of the Twentieth Century at the European
University Institute in Florence. Among her most recent books is Europe in Love,
Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (1999,
2000).
J. G. A. POCOCK is Professor Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University where
he taught from 1974 to 1994. He held previous appointments at Washington
University in St. Louis and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His
published works include The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957,
1987), The Machiavellian Moment (1975), Virtue, Commerce and History (1985),
and the first two volumes (1999) of Barbarism and Religion, a series related to
Edward Gibbon. He is also at work on a consideration of British history in relation
to Europe and beyond.
THOMAS RISSE is Joint Chair in International Relations at the Robert Schuman
Centre and the Department of Social and Political Science of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His most recent publications are, as editor, with
Stephen Ropp and Catherine Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International
Norms and Domestic Change (1999) and, with James Caporaso and Maria GreenCowles, Transforming Europe: Europeanisation and Domestic Change (2000).
PHILIP RUTTLEY was educated at Oxford University and was called to the Bar in
1980. After practicing in EC law in London and Brussels, he served as a UN legal
advisor in Rome and then as an EC advisor to the UK Governments Treasury
Solicitors Department. He is a Partner in the EC and WTO department of the
international City firm of Clyde & Co. He has appeared in many cases before the
EC Courts and has been involved in several WTO dispute settlement proceedings.
He has published widely on EC and World Trade Organization issues and is
Secretary of the World Trade Law Association.
JAMES TULLY is a Jackson Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at
the University of Toronto. He is a political theorist and historian of political
thought. His most recent publications are Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (1995), co-editor with Alain Gagnon, Struggles
for Recognition in Multinational Societies: Spain, Belgium, United Kingdom,
European Union and Canada in Comparative Perspective (2000), and To Think
and Act Differently, in Foucault Contra Habermas, ed. S. Ashenden and D. Owen
(1999).

Index

Abendland, 296
Aboriginal peoples, rights of, 3513
absolutism, 124
Espanola,

Accion
327
Acton, Lord, 326
Adam Smith Institute, 162
Adenauer, Konrad, 287, 315; foreign policy
of, 2948
Adonnino Committee, 242
Adoua, 183
Aegean Sea, 56
Aeneas, 34
Aeneid (Virgil), 345
Africa, 26, 36, 38, 51, 57, 59, 201, 212,
323; and European Community, 194,
238. See also North Africa
Agamemnon, 34
Agenor, 34
Age of Louis XIV (Voltaire), 64
Aglietta, Michel, 272
agriculture, 489, 78, 79
Albania, 60, 181
Albigensian Crusade, 78
Algeria, 212
Allemagne, De l (de Stael), 125
All-Union Geographical Society, 47
Alpers, Svetlana, 51
Americas, 19, 64, 66; imagery of, 50, 51; as
other, 201, 202. See also Canada; Latin
America; North America; United States
Amsterdam, Treaty of, 28, 232, 243, 247,
255, 287; policies of, 24850
Anabaptism, 64
anarchism, 328
ancestor cults, 132
Anchises, 34
Ancien Regime, 65, 121, 122
Anderson, Benedict, 25, 290
Anderson, Perry, 192, 219
Angevins, 62

Anglo-French Consortium, 65
Annee sociologique school, 149
Anselm, Saint, 73
Antarctica, 58
anthropology, 140, 1456
anti-Americanism, 202
anti-Europeanism, 173
Antioch, Lords Supper at, 1334
antiquity. See Greeks, ancient; Roman
Empire
Antonius Pius, 42
Apology (Grotius), 103
Arabs, 59. See also Muslims
Arcana in Republics and Principalities
(Wassenaer), 1056
Arcanis, De (Clapmarius), 1045
architecture, Gothic, 8990
Argyrou, Vassos, 145
aristocracy and religion, 1034
Arminians, 97, 103
army. See military power
artisans, 164, 165; corporatism and, 166,
1678; Cretan, 1667, 1689
Artus, Patrick, 277
Ascanius, 34
Asia, 27, 38, 45, 47, 51, 56, 58, 59, 323;
concepts of, 11718; and European
Community, 194, 238; influence of,
346; as other, 46, 201
Athens, 1367
Augustus, 42
Australia, 58, 140, 352
Austria, 57, 65, 67, 75, 119, 123,
238
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, 181
Austro-Marxists, 1845
authority, 4, 44, 73, 82; legal, 42, 43; and
rebellion, 1545
autonomy, 41, 168
Avignon, 62, 88, 121

363

364

Index

Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 88, 90

Bacon, Francis, 33
Bade Wurtemburg, 186
Bakunin, Mikhail, Federalism, Socialism
and Antitheology, 184
balance-of-power system, 127
Balkan Peninsula, 667, 70, 75, 213. See
also various countries
Balladur government, 279
Baltic Sea, 58, 74, 79
Barr`es, M., 325, 327
Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe, 60
Basque country: nationalism, 326, 328;
regionalist movements, 317, 318, 320,
329
Basques, 31
Basque Nationalist Party, 329
Batavian Republic, 967
Battaglia, Debbora, 164
Baxandall, Michael, 51
Belgium, 168, 233, 234, 278
Benedict, Ruth, 151
Benelux Treaty, 233
Bentham, Jeremy, 114; Plan for an
Universal and Perpetual Peace, 175
Berbers, 45
Berlin, family law in, 1456
Bern, 124
Bernal, Martin, Black Athena, 155
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 206
Bicchieri, Guala, 86
Black, Max, 1489
Black Athena (Bernal), 155
Black Sea, 56, 58, 59
Bobbio, Norberto, 196
Bohemia, 75
Bologna, 83
Bolshevism, 177
Bonapartist regime, 120. See also
Napoleon I
Boniface VIII, Pope, 62
Borneman, John, 145
Bosnia, 213
Bosporus, 56
Boston Tea Party, 153
boundaries, 201; national, 2245
Bourdieu, Pierre, 147, 161
Boxer, Charles, 13
Brahmanism, 132
Braidotti, Rosi, 30, 207
Brandt, Willy, 299, 300
Braudel, Fernand, 37
Bretton Woods, 266
Briand, Aristide, 177, 185, 192
British Commonwealth, 230, 233. See also
United Kingdom
British East India Company, 19

British Isles, 64, 75, 79

Brussels, Treaty of, 233
budgetary policy, 2734
Budgetary Treaty, 244
Bulgaria, 60, 185
Bundesbank: and European Monetary
Union, 268, 269, 271, 275, 276, 277,
284, 307, 311, 313; interest rates and,
277, 279, 280
Burckhardt, Jacob, 137
bureaucracies, 27, 122, 146; Catholic
Church, 878
Burgersdijk, Franco, 14, 99100
Burke, Edmund, 15, 19, 47, 52, 65, 66,
222; on Roman law, 423
Byzantines, 63
Calvinism, 64, 98, 100, 102
Campbell, J. K., 165
Campoformio, Treaty of, 123
Canada, 194, 325, 333, 352
Canterbury, archbishop of, 87
capitalism, 129, 2312
Caribbean, 65
Carlism, 327
Carmina Burana, 72
Caro Baroja, Julio, 150
Castile, 320
cartography, 578
caste system, 132
Castilians, 74
Catalan nationalist party (CIU), 329
catalanismo, 320
Catalonia, 186; nationalism in, 326, 328;
regionalist movements in, 317, 318,
320, 329
Catalonians, 31, 74
Catherine the Great, 46
Catholic Church, 3, 89, 13, 22, 69, 73;
expansion of, 601, 62; Latin and, 43,
44. See also Roman Catholic Church,
Roman Catholicism
Cattaneo, Carlo, 18, 43; Gli stati uniti
dItalia, 183

CDS. See Centro Democratico

y Social
CDU. See Christian Democratic Party
Celtic peoples, 60, 61
Central Asia, 66
Central Europe, 61, 65, 145, 219

Centro Democratico
y Social (CDS), 329
Chaeronea, battle of, 39
Channel Tunnel, 69
Charlemagne, 45, 62
Charles I, 98
Charles II, 6
Charles V, 44, 45, 6364
Charles X (comte dArtois), 116

Index
China, 50, 52, 53, 66, 194, 197; state in,
1312
Ching empire, 66
chocolatiers, 168
Christendom, 43, 456, 75, 21213
Christian Democratic Party (CDU), 20,
295, 298, 300, 3045
Christianity, 4, 5, 35, 43, 44, 45, 100, 214,
320; confraternity and, 1334; cultural
identity of, 1213; expansion of, 601,
62; and knowledge, 4950; and politics,
1012; as unifying force, 11819
Churchill, Winston, 178, 230
cities, 39, 41, 42, 130; ancient vs.
medieval, 1356
citizens, 119, 131, 223n26, 332; ancient vs.
medieval, 1348; and cultural
differences, 355, 3568; free, 912
citizenship: as concept, 188, 222;
European, 26, 478; and European
Union, 1856, 189, 190; French,
2234; and national identity, 2912,
346; Weber on, 12934
city-states, 8, 1323
CIU. See Catalan nationalist party
Cive, De (Hobbes), 98
civilization: and commerce, 645;
European, 21416; Islamic, 21718
civil wars, 13, 79, 82
civitas, 40
Clapmarius, 109; De arcanis
rerumpublicarum, 1045, 1067
climate (in High Middle Ages) 79
Cluny, 81
coastlands, geographic definitions from,
567, 59
Cobban, Alfred, 323
Cobden, Richard, 176
Cockfield, Lord, White Paper of, 2423
Code Napoleon, 122
Coercion, Capital, and the European
States, 9901990 (Tilly), 31920
Cohen, Anthony, 142; on personal
nationalism, 144, 149, 151, 154; Self
Consciousness, 143
Cold War, 69, 179, 230, 2345, 296, 302
collective personality, 224
collective values, 1678
colonialism, 12, 53, 145, 149, 212, 341;
British, 10, 223; and cultural
imperialism, 3378. See also
decolonization
colonization, 19, 523
Columbus, Christopher, 50
Come si diventa europei? (Noteboom), 198
commerce, 14, 15, 64, 126, 127, 262, 341;
cities and, 135, 136; competition and,

365

1920; European, 39, 176; and

European Community, 2569; and
republicanism, 99, 115
commercial society, 14, 15, 17, 1819,
52
Committee of Ministers (Council of
Europe), 233
Committee of Three Wise Men, 241
Common Agricultural Policy, 237,
252
Common Commercial Policy, 237
Common Customs Union, 237
Common Market, 235, 237, 239
Common Transport Policy, 237
commune, 130, 133
communication, cultural idioms of, 146
communism, as other, 295, 296
communitarianism, 172
community, 30, 31, 49, 132, 324; ethnicity
and, 534; Greek views of, 401;
identity and, 3940; imagined, 25, 140;
inventing, 256; in Middle Ages,
1323, 135; Rome as, 412;
self-governing, 130, 131
Comnena, Anna, 61
compass, 63
competition, 1920, 38, 39, 159
Comte Ory, Le (Rossini), 116
Conciliarism, 88
Condorcet, Marquis de, 53, 120; Esquisse
dun tableau historique des progr`es de
lesprit humain, 1617
confraternity, 1323
congress for Europe, 233
Congress of Peace, 176
Congress of the Free School of Political
Sciences, 1767
Congress of Vienna, 3, 13, 15, 22, 173
Connolly, William, 224, 225
Considerations sur le gouvernement de
Pologne (Rousseau), 174
Considerations sur la Revolution francaise
(de Stael), 125
Constant, Benjamin, 5, 14, 124, 137,
331, 332; De lesprit de conquete,
12526; The Liberty of the Ancients
Compared with that of the Moderns,
29; on pluralism, 1718
Constantinople, 63, 66, 75
constitution and equality, 348, 349
continent, concept of, 57
constitutionalism, 56, 8, 267, 349, 351,
357
contract(s), 4, 136
Contraremonstrants, 102
Convegno Volta, 191
conviviencia, 319, 326

366

Index

cooperation, 7; Amsterdam Treaty and,

2489; European, 2334
Coornhert, Dirck, 96
Coppet, chateau of, 124
Copts, 75
Corinne, ou lItalie (de Stael), 125
corporatism, 166, 1678
Corvinus, Joannes, 109; De arcanis, 104,
105, 107

Cosmographia (Munster),
51
cosmopolitanism, 16, 72, 74, 78, 83, 124,
174, 176; vs. localism, 73, 89; of papal
legates, 867
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard, 177, 192,
295
Council Commission, 236
Council of Europe, 233
Court, Johann de la, 5, 98; Interests of
Holland and West-Friesland, 91
Court, Pieter de la, 5, 96, 98, 99, 105;
Interests of Holland and West-Friesland,
91; Politicke consideration, 106; on
republicanism, 923, 95, 110
Crete, artisans on, 164, 165, 1667, 1689
Crise de la conscience europeenne, La
(Hazard), 198
Croats, 61
Croatia, 75, 219
Cruce, Emeric, Le Nouveau Cynee, 14
crusades, 50, 61, 63, 74, 75, 80, 85,
218n19
culture(s), 26, 77, 160, 188, 197, 201, 219;
and citizenship, 3567; equality and,
34750; European, 12, 234, 2056,
2078; and European Union, 22, 162;
Greek, 389, 1601; Herder on, 3445;
human development and, 3412,
3434; identity and, 3457; imperial,
3367; indigenous, 3512; interactions
of, 3445; national, 1523; pluralism
of, 512; ranking of, 3545; respect for,
3489; and self-government, 3501
Culture and Imperialism (Said), 336
currency, 277, 280n24, 282; imbalances in,
2667; national, 288, 305; single,
3067, 31012. See also Euro;
European Monetary Union
Cyprus, 145
Czechoslovakia, 69, 185, 230
Czechs, 61, 219
Dankert, Piet, 240
Dante Alighieri, 44
Davignon Report, 240
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen (1789), 121, 222
Declaration on European Identity, 1945

Declaration on European Union, 241

decolonization, 215, 333, 337
deflation, 272
Dehler, Thomas, 297
Delors, Jacques, 233, 243
Delors Report, 268
De Maizi`ere, Lothar, 47
De Martino, Ernesto, 203
democracy, 22, 187, 189, 329, 334n26;
Athenian, 1367; liberal, 67
Deng Hsiao Ping, 6
Denmark, 58, 196, 238; and European
Community, 29, 231, 237, 239, 243,
245; European Monetary Union and,
278, 285
Derrida, Jacques, 12, 2067, 345
Descartes, Rene, 149
despotism, 126, 132
dEstaing, Valery Giscard, 267
Deutsch, Karl W., 290
de Witt, John, 96, 110, 112n14
Diderot, 62, 66, 96; Encyclopedie, 117,
197; Philosophical and Political
History of the Two Indies, 64, 65
Directory (France), 121, 122
Discourses to the German Nation (Fichte),
324
discrimination, policies against, 24950
dIstria, Dora, 142
diversity, 197; cultural, 210, 3456, 3567
dogmatism, 91, 93
Douglas, Mary, 146
Draft Treaty on European Union, 242
Droit des gens, ou principes de la loi
naturelle appliques a la conduite et aux
affaires des nations et des souverains,
Le (Vattel), 489
Dumont, Louis, 147; Homo Hierarchicus,
139
Dunde, Alan, 141
Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, LEurope:
Histoire de ses peuples, 178
Dutch East India Company, 19
Dutch Republic (United Provinces), 5, 13,
19, 100; religious tolerance in, 1013;
republicanism in, 95, 969, 10610,
11213, 11415; and Spain, 1078;
Spinoza and, 11112
Duties of Man, The (Mazzini), 182
East Berlin, 230
Eastern Europe, 145, 194. See also various
countries
East Germany, 2, 47, 69, 201, 269; and
European identity, 3045; reunification
and, 297, 302, 3034
ECB. See European Central Bank

Index
economics: community and, 91, 1345,
234; European Monetary Union and,
2789; of High Middle Ages, 73, 78
Economics and France Committee, 274
economy, 7, 80, 94; European Monetary
Union, 2634; of High Middle Ages,
7881; inflation and, 2701; Napoleon
and, 1267
ECSC. See European Coal and Steel
Community
ECHR. See European Convention on
Human Rights
ECJ. See European Court of Justice
ECU. See European Currency Unit
EDC. See European Defense Community
EEC. See European Economic Community
EFTA. See European Free Trade
Association
157, 158, 159, 163
eghosmos,
Egypt, 567, 131
Basic Program, 2956
Eichstatt
Eighty Years War, 13
elites, 122, 160; East German, 3035;
German, 297, 3078, 314; languages of,
445; and nation-state identities, 2923;
political, 287, 288; religion and, 1034;
responsible government and, 912
Emba River, 47
empire(s), 9, 10, 14, 42, 44, 67, 82; French,
1223. See also by name
EMU. See European Monetary Union
Encyclopedie (Diderot and DAlembert),
117, 197
England, 74, 78, 81, 83, 96, 136, 145, 153,
173, 222; papacy and, 86, 87. See also
United Kingdom
Enlightenment, 9, 10, 667, 70, 120, 123,
196, 214, 216, 222, 320, 334, 335,
338n26, 353, 354; commerce and,
645; historical view of, 624; and
nation-states, 119, 137, 1734
environmental policy, 253
equality and cultural differences, 34750,
3568
Erasmus, 14
Erler, Fritz, 299
ERM. See Exchange Rate Mechanism
ERTA. See European Road Transport
Agreement
ESCB. See European system of central
banks
Esprit des Lois (Montesquieu), 118
Esquisse dun tableau historique des
progr`es de lesprit humain (Condorcet),
1617
esprit de conquete, De l (Constant), 1256
Estonia, 75

367

ETA. See Euskadi y Libertad

ethnic cleansing, 146
ethnicity, 534
ethnocentrism, 203
EURATOM, 231, 232, 236, 245, 256
Euro, 285; adoption of, 280, 288; creation
of, 276, 277; Germany and, 305, 307,
3089, 31012. See also European
Monetary Union
Eurocentrism, 1467, 175, 200, 3212,
3523, 354
Euro XI, 285
Europa, 34, 56, 59
Europe: construct and reality of, 556; as
culturally superior, 3423; Habsburg
view of, 578; as identity, 33, 2067;
imagery of, 50, 51; philosophy of,
1011; as superior, 11718
European Atomic Energy Community, 235
European Central Bank (ECB), 263, 264,
269, 270, 274, 275, 283, 285, 305;
Germany and, 306, 311
European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC), 171, 232, 234, 235, 245, 256,
297
European Coal and Steel Community
Treaty, 231
European Commission, 2, 29, 23031,
238, 240, 241
European Community (EC), 194, 211, 230,
232, 234, 242, 257, 259; budget of,
2445; competence of, 2545; legal
system of, 2503; monetary policy of,
26670; policies of, 2467; sovereignty
and, 2534. See also European Economic
Community; European Union
European Convention on Human Rights
(ECHR), 2334, 246
European Council, 236, 239, 249, 2545
European Court of Justice (ECJ), 2, 26, 27,
28, 29, 43, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235,
236, 249, 259, 268; activism of, 2578;
common positions of, 254, 255; legal
system of, 2568; and legislation, 251,
2523
European Currency Unit (ECU), 27, 245
European Customs Union, 177
European Defense Community (EDC),
232, 2345
European Defensive Council, 6
European Economic Community (EEC), 6,
18, 20, 65, 68, 171, 193, 231, 232,
235, 256; expansion of, 2378,
23940; organization of, 2367; United
Kingdom and, 230, 239
European Economic Community Treaty,
235, 2367, 245, 256, 257

368

Index

European Federalist Movement, 198

European Free Trade Association (EFTA),
2389
Europeanism: Adenauers, 29495, 315; of
German Social Democrats, 299300
Europeanization, 201
European Monetary Agreement, 266
European Monetary Institute, 311
European Monetary System, 245
European Monetary Union (EMU), 7, 247,
269, 2712, 277, 288; bureaucracy
and, 2745; economic integration and,
2614, 2789; features of, 26970;
France and, 2756; Germany and, 305,
30614; political factors of, 2816;
sovereignty and, 2646
European Parliament, 2, 27, 289, 193,
236, 241, 242, 248; budget and, 2445;
legal system and, 2513
European Political Community, 232, 235
European Political Cooperation, 240, 243
European Quadrige, 186
European Road Transport Agreement
(ERTA), 254
European Space Agency, 146
European system of central banks (ESCB),
272, 2834
European Union, 2, 6, 12, 20, 21, 26, 27,
29, 30, 54, 70, 120, 162, 168, 171,
172, 187, 219, 220, 2289, 351;
Amsterdam Treaty and, 2489;
capitalism and, 2312; as citizenship,
1856, 189, 190; Germany and, 305,
31516; Greece and, 147, 148; as
inexorable, 689; legal order of, 312;
Maastricht Treaty and, 2478
European Union of Payments, 266
Europe: Histoire de ses peuples, L
(Duroselle), 178
EUROPOL, 249
Euskadi y Libertad (ETA), 329
Euxine Sea. See Black Sea
Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 245,
262, 263, 2678, 275, 277; collapse of,
269n9, 27980; and politics, 278, 279
exoticism, 1456, 167, 168
family, 73, 134, 1456
fanaticism, 64
Fanon, Frantz, 347; Wretched of the Earth,
3378
Farr, James R., 166
Fascists, 191
Faubion, James, 158
FDP. See Free Democratic Party
federalism, 17, 192, 1989, 201, 229, 334,
335, 351; budgetary, 2856; and EEC,

238, 242; European, 287, 31415;

German, 300, 314; vs. imperialism,
3323; and unification, 2312
Federalism, Socialism and Antitheology
(Bakunin), 184
Federal Republic of Germany. See West
Germany
Federal Reserve Bank, 284
Federal Union, 192
federation, 6, 228, 3312, 333, 339
Federative Principle, The (Proudhon), 184
Femmes pour lEurope, 198
Ferguson, Adam, 49
feudalism, 601, 63, 77
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 174; Discourses to
the German Nation, 324
Finland, 75, 239
Fischer, Joschka, 7, 229, 309, 315
Flanders, 79
Fletcher, Andrew, 339
Florence, 79
Fontainebleau Council Summit, 242
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 96
Foucault, Michel, 334
Founding Fathers of Europe, 178, 179
Fourth Crusade, 75
France, 18, 62, 65, 66, 75, 76, 78, 83, 88,
128, 169, 209, 212, 222, 237, 323, 325;
and Cold War, 230, 2345; conquests of,
1212; constitution of, 121; Consulate,
122; economy in, 234, 271; and
European Economic Community, 68,
2378, 240; European integration and,
2301; and European Monetary Union,
2623, 2756, 277, 278, 2812; and
Gothic architecture, 89, 90; imperialism
of, 19, 11920; Muslims in, 214n10,
2234, 245; Napoleon and, 67, 1223
Francis I, 46
Francoism, 321, 322, 327, 3289
Frankish kingdom, 62
Frederick the Great, 6, 46
Free Democratic Party (FDP), 297
freedom(s), 45, 237; commercial society
and, 17, 18; individual, 912, 333; and
public reason, 3556; republicanism
and, 1089
Free Thoughts on Religions, the Church
and National Happiness (B.M.), 11314
French East India Company, 19
French language, 445, 85
French people, 18, 149, 168, 173
French Revolution, 6, 15, 48, 65, 66, 117,
119; principles of, 1201
Friedman, Milton, 270
Friedrich, Carl, Inevitable Peace, 334
frontiers, 118

Index
Furet, Francois, 121
Fustel de Coulanges, N. D., 137
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 11, 198; Die
Vielfalt Europas, 197
GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade
Gaulle, Charles de, 237, 238, 239
Gellner, Ernst, 265, 290
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), 238, 255
Geneva, 124
Genscher, Hans Dietrich, 263, 276
Genscher-Colombo Plan, 241
Genoa, 79, 121
geography, 567; of High Middle Ages,
745; Napoleonic wars and, 1278
Geremek, Bronislaw, 196
German Central Bank, 276, 279
German Empire, 57
Germanic customary law, 42
German Social Democrats. See Social
Democratic Party
Germans, 17, 19, 59, 173
Germany, 65, 68, 69, 75, 176, 212, 245,
256, 271, 287, 323; and Cold War,
2345; East German elites and, 3035;
European identity in, 288, 31416;
European Monetary Union, 262, 263,
275, 276, 278, 279, 30614; and
European unification, 2989; exchange
rate mechanism and, 2778; foreign
policy of, 294300; medieval markets
in, 79, 80; monetary policy of, 267,
2689, 272; national identity in, 3001;
reunification of, 2, 21, 2812, 287,
3024; and unified Europe, 22930
Gibbon, Edward, 39, 62, 63, 66
Giddens, Anthony, 159
Giles of Verracclo, 86
Girondins, 325
Gli stati uniti dItalia (Cattaneo), 183
globalization, 3, 187
Godesberg program, 300
Goebbels, Joseph, 191
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21
Gomarists, 98
Goths, 42
governments, 3, 37, 91, 117, 120, 197;
Napoleonic, 1223; power of, 45;
representative, 2212; republican, 92,
1067; tolerance and consensus in,
1001
Grand Design, 14, 54

Grass, Gunter,
21
Graswinckel, Dirk, De iure majestatis,
104

369

Great Britain. See England; Scotland;

United Kingdom
Great Schism, 88, 90
Greece, 8, 75, 145, 181, 185, 205, 285;
communal life in, 401; culture in, 389,
160; and European Community, 237,
239; history and, 1556; individualism
in, 144, 1579, 1646; naming system
in, 1602; national character of, 61, 150,
1567; nationalism in, 1478, 155;
selfhood in, 1578; territorial issues of,
1634; warrior guilds in, 1356
Greeks, 131, 153, 169; ancient, 4, 34, 36,
37, 567, 118
Greek Orthodoxy, 35, 75
Greenfield, Liah, 141
Green Party, 253
Grotius, Hugo, 5, 51, 52, 93, 94, 96, 113,
175; works by, 98, 1012, 103, 104
Guigou paper, 268
guilds, 133; warrior, 1356
Guizot, Francois, 26, 139, 162
gunpowder, 9, 63
Haas, Ernst, 290, 295

Habermas, Jurgen,
26, 188, 301, 355, 357
Habsburg dynasty, 64, 94
Habsburg (Hapsburg) family, 578, 96
Hague conference, 179

Handworterbuch
der Staatswissenschaften
(Weber), 130
Handler, Richard, 140, 152
Hanse, 74
Harrington, James, 91
Hay, Denys, 212
Hazard, Paul, La crise de la conscience
europeenne, 198
Hecateus, 38
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 35, 37
hegemony, 124, 134, 230
Held, David, 334
Helen of Troy, 34
Heller, Agnes, 23, 2078
Hemsterhuis, Francois, 96
Henry VIII, 87
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 174, 324,
354; on cultures, 3445; Ideas on the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind,
343
Herodotus, 34, 36, 37, 38, 49
Herstelden Prins, Den (The Prince
Restored), 111
High Middle Ages, 7273; architecture of,
8990; economy of, 7881; geography
of, 745; Roman Catholic Church in,
868; scholasticism in, 835
Hirschmann, Ursula, 30, 1989, 207

370

Index

Hirschon, Renee, 159

history: and Asia, 356, 64; of Europe,
623, 69, 216; German national,
300, 301; Greece and, 1556; world,
3401
History of Russia under Peter the Great
(Voltaire), 58, 656
History of Western Philosophy (Russell),
149
Hobbes, Thomas, De Cive, 98
Hoggart, Richard, 196
Hohenstaufen, 62
Holland, 92, 102, 121; republicanism in,
9394, 9599, 10613, 11415. See
also Netherlands
Hollandische Sybille, 108
Holy Alliance, 182
Holy Alliance of Nations, 182
Holy Roman Empire, 9, 44, 64, 789, 823
Hood, Robin, 153, 154
Horace, 42
Hugo, Victor, 176
humanism, 14, 338n26
humanity, 10
human rights, 2334, 246
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 5
Hume, 9, 62, 63, 64
Hungarians, 61
Hungary, 61, 69, 75, 219, 230
Iberian Peninsula, 57, 74, 79, 217, 320
Iceland, 75, 239
iconicity, 1612
Iconologia (Ripa), 51
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind (Herder), 343
identity, 1, 33, 139, 210, 348; community,
3940; constructing, 246; cultural, 12,
203, 3457; and cultural imperialism,
3378; European, 3, 156, 162, 192,
1935, 199200, 205, 2068, 211,
215, 216, 21819, 296, 301, 3045,
31416; Germany and, 287, 3001;
Greece and, 1556; imperialism and,
1314; national, 127, 1545, 1789,
250; nation-state, 28994; respect for,
2256; transnational, 234
Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose (Kant), 16, 341,
342
IGC. See Intergovernmental Conference
Illyria, 60
immigrants: to France, 215, 2234;
Muslim, 12, 209, 210, 2234
imperialism, 10, 1112, 1516, 19, 523,
65, 67, 70, 335; cultural, 3368, 343;
vs. federalism, 3323; French, 11920,

1213; identity and, 1314; opposition

to, 1246, 340
Imperio summarum potestatum circa
sacra, De (Grotius), 103
Imperium Oecumenicum, 14, 100
independence, 181, 333
India, 67, 131, 132
indigenous peoples, rights of, 3513
individual(s), 217; freedom of, 912;
politics and, 11314. See also citizens,
citizenship
individualism, 10, 13940, 147, 162, 328,
333; artisans and, 1689; Greek, 1579,
164; and national culture, 1523;
rationalism and, 1489; resistance and,
1645; and selfhood, 16970
industrialism, 68, 144
industrialization, 180, 214
Inevitable Peace (Friedrich), 334
inflation, 27071, 273, 282
inheritance, 161
Innocent III, Pope, 82, 86
intellectuals, Christian, 4950
interest rates and exchange rate
mechanism, 2778, 279
Interests of Holland and West-Friesland (de
la Court and de la Court), 91, 111
Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), 245,
246
Internal Market, 2423
Internal Revenue Service, 1534
International Congress (Rome), 176
International League of Peoples, 182
Inventing Eastern Europe (Wolff), 667
Invention of Tradition, The (Hobsbawm
and Ranger), 143
Investiture Controversy, 82
Ionian Islands, 145
Ireland, 66, 145, 237, 239
Iselin, 174
Islam, 59, 61, 225; civilization of, 21718;
as other, 1213, 214; as threat, 46, 209,
210, 213
Isocrates, 389
isolation, 80
Italian, 44
Italy, 46, 58, 65, 75, 79, 83, 121, 134, 205,
234; and European Monetary Union,
281, 282; pro-national nationalism in,
1812; unification of, 176, 183
iure belli ac pacis, De (Grotius), 98, 104
iure majestatis, De (Graswinckel), 104
Jacobins, 121, 122, 137, 223, 224, 325
Japan, 68, 131, 151, 164, 194, 230, 276
Jaucourt, Chevalier de, 117
Jefferson, Thomas, 5

Index
Jews, 75, 133, 217
Joan of Arc, 78
John, King, 86
John of Abbeville, 86
Johnson, Douglas, 196
Johnson, Mark, 149
Jordan, William Chester, 9, 10
Judt, Tony, 212
Juno, 35
Justinian, 43
Kaeeble, Hartmut, 200
Kaisen, Wilhelm, 299
Kaiser, Jakob, 297
Kaminka, Eugene, 323
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 8, 16, 23, 38, 176,
331, 334, 339, 347, 349, 353, 358; on
cultural development, 3434, 352;
cultural ranking of, 3545; works of, 6,
16, 175, 3323, 3356, 3401, 3423,
351
Karpathos, 161
Keating, Michael, 325
Kenna, Margaret, 161
kleftes, 153, 157
knowledge, access to, 4950
Kohl, Helmut, 7, 268, 269, 277, 305, 310,
313, 314, 315; on European Monetary
Union, 307, 3089
Kondo, Dorinne, 164
Korsgaard, Christine, 23, 346
Kossmann, E. H., 112
Krerch River, 47
Kundera, Milan, 219
Kymlica, Will, 340, 350
labor contracts, 136
Lackoff, George, 149
Lactantius, 34
Laden, Anthony, 347, 357
Lafontaine, Oskar, 310
Lanfranc, 734
language(s): diversity of, 1989; dominant,
445; in Middle Ages, 846; unifying,
434
Languedoc-Roussillon, 186
Latin, 4344, 73; literary and intellectual
use of, 845
Latin America, 194, 323, 333
Latin culture, 61, 62, 69; history and, 63,
64
Latins, 34, 35
Latvia, 75
Lausanne Conference, 179
law, 28, 49, 134; family, 1456; Roman,
423, 44; rule of, 37, 38, 41
Leach, Edmund, 153
League of Nations, 192, 3334

371

legal order, 4; European Union and, 267,

28, 312
legal system, 267; of European
Community, 2503; and European
Court of Justice, 2568
legates, papal, 867
Legato, De (Maggi), 44
Leibniz, Gottfried-Wilhelm, 45
Leo the Great, 43
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 2234
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 149
liberalism, 22, 49, 115, 210
liberation, 338; Greek, 1578
liberty, 4, 30, 37, 96, 115
Liberty of the Ancients Compared with
that of the Moderns, The (Constant), 29
Libya, 36
Lipsius, 104
literature, Latin, 845
Lithuania, 219
Lithuanians, 61, 756
litterature consideree dans ses rapports
avec les institutions sociales, De la (de
Stael), 125
liturgies, Athenian, 1367
Lloyd, G. E. R., 149
localism, 9, 73, 77, 80, 83, 89, 140
Locke, John, 216, 356; Second Treatise on
Government, 48
Lombards, 31
Lombardy, 79, 123, 186
Lome Convention, 238
London, 79
Louis XIV, 6, 43, 44, 64
Louis XVI, 122
Low Countries, 75, 91, 978. See also
Belgium; Dutch Republic; Holland;
Netherlands
Lubbertus, Sybrand, 101, 102
Luther, Martin, 5
Lutheranism, 64, 69, 100
Luxembourg, 233, 234
Luxembourg Accords, 238, 239
Maastricht compromise, 263
Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European
Union), 27, 33, 171, 179, 185, 186,
193, 231, 232, 243, 246, 264; Germany
and, 309, 31314; monetary policy
and, 268, 272, 274, 277, 282, 312;
pillars of, 2478
Macedonia, 60, 156, 1634
Machiavelli, 4, 38, 109
Macpherson, C. B., 152; The Rise of
Possessive Individualism, 139
Madariaga, Salvador de, 54
Madison, James, 333

372

Index

Maggi, Ottaviano, De Legato, 44

Maizi`ere, Lothar De, 3045
Making of Europe, The (Bartlett), 60
Malta, 145
Mandeville, Bernard, 94, 95, 99, 114
Manifesto di Ventotene, 192
Mann, Thomas, 287
marginalization, 31, 164, 169, 217
Marjolin Report, 266
markets, 176; financial, 27980; growth of,
73, 79
Marshall, John, 352
Marshall Plan, 133
Martino, Fedinando, 183
Marx, Karl, 222
Marxism, 296, 328
Matthias, Erich, 298
Maurits, Prince, 1023
Mauro, Fra, 47
Maurras, C., 325, 327
Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 213
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 5, 18, 31, 1812
Mediterranean, 36, 37, 56, 59, 74, 194
Meinecke, Ferdinand, 322, 324
Menelaus, 34
Merger Treaty (1965), 20
Mesopotamia, 131
messianism, 179
Messina Conference, 231, 235
Metternich, Klemens von, 182
Michelet, Jules, 6
Middle Ages, 9, 10, 131, 132, 133,
134, 135. See also High Middle Ages
Middle East, 194, 212
migrants, 1989
Milan, 79
Milbank, John, 226
military power, 8, 9, 63, 67, 122,
131
Mill, John Stuart, 5, 349
Milosz, Czeslaw, 219
Ming Empire, 9
minorities, 221, 2223
Mirabeau, Marquis de, 15
miscegenation, 153
missionary activity, 81
Mitterand, Francois, 269
modernism, 187n19; individualism and,
165, 1689
modernity, 1956
modernization, 46, 63
Modiglianu, Franco, 280
monarchies, 6, 92, 93, 97; military, 9, 63,
678; papal, 823, 86, 89
monastic reform, 81, 87
monetary policy: of European Community,
26670, 2712, 274, 2816; Germany

and, 31012. See also European

Monetary Union
Mongols, 61
Monnet, Jean, 8, 25, 192, 233, 234, 268,
299
Montaigne, Michel de, 44, 51
Montesquieu, 4, 5, 14, 378, 52, 93, 115,
124; Esprit des Lois, 118; on
nationalism, 1745
Montpellier, 83
Moravia, 75
Morocco, 149
Moscow, 167
Mout, Nicolette, 112
Mulier, Haitsma, 112

Muller,
Adam, 17
multiculturalism, 344
multilingualism, 445
Mundell, Robert, 275

Munster,
Sebastian, Cosmographia, 51
Muslims, 75, 211, 213; in Europe, 12,
20910, 220, 320; political
representation of, 221, 2237
mythology, 335
naming system, Greek, 1602
Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte), 17, 43,
94, 332; on administration, 1223; and
French empire, 11920; opposition to,
1246
Napoleonic wars, 3, 67, 117, 119,
127
nation(s), 31, 171, 318; as concept,
174, 1878; political vs. cultural,
3226. See also nation-state(s)
nation building, 21
National Assembly (France), 121
national character, 1501, 1734, 323;
Greek, 1567
national consciousness, 1734
nationalism(s), 19, 23, 31, 1401, 142,
152, 199, 237, 320, 325; European, 21,
1713, 17480, 18990; German, 301,
314; Greek, 147, 148; personal, 1434,
149, 151, 154, 164; pro-national, 1816;
and pluralism, 1718, 326; and rebellion,
1545; Spanish, 31719; and unified
Europe, 22930
nationality, 1878
Nationality Code, 224
national-populism, 172
National Synod of the Reformed Church,
102
nation-state(s), 2, 9, 21, 140, 152, 173,
174, 1867, 298; boundaries, 2245;
ethnicity and, 534; identities as,
28994; Spain as, 3201

Index
NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty
Organization
nature, 41, 489
Nazi Germany, 20, 191, 192, 212; as other,
298, 314
Near East, 75
Netherlands, 13, 19, 57, 65, 66, 68, 136,
233, 234, 256; European Monetary
Union and, 278, 279. See also Dutch
Republic; Holland
New World, 63
New Zealand, 352
Nice, 121
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 328; Beyond
Good and Evil, 206
Nixon, Richard, 266
Noli, Teofan, 18, 181
North Africa, 456
North America, 10, 65. See also Canada;
United States
North American Free Trade Agreement,
69
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), 233, 234, 297, 303
North Sea, 58, 74
North-South: concept of, 367;
relationships with, 3, 13
Norway, 238, 239
Noteboom, Cees, Come si diventa
europei? 198
Nottingham, 153, 154
Nouveau Cynee, Le (Cruce), 14
Novalis, 18
Occident, 131, 295
Occidentalism, 148
Ochakov crisis, 47
OEEC. See Organization for European
Economic Cooperation
Oldenbarneveldt, Johan, 101, 102
oligarchies, 92
Orange, House of, 97
Orangeism, 106
orbis terrarum, 43
Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas
(Grotius), 101
Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (OEEC), 233
Orient, 47, 131, 139, 295
Oriental Despotism, 67, 196
Orientalism, 138, 148
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 177, 323
Osser, Bernard, 213
Ostpolitik, 300
other, 213; defining, 2002, 300; and
European identity, 207, 296; German
concepts of, 295, 314

373

Ottoman Empire, 9, 12, 34, 456, 61, 66,

70, 166, 181; as other, 667
Ovid, 59
Own-Resources Decision (1970), 244
Oxford University, 83
pacifism, 175
Padoa Schioppa, Tommaso, 275
pagans, 75
Palestine, 75
Pan-Albanian federation, 181
Pan-European Movement, 177, 192
papacy, 63, 90, 100; location of, 889; and
monarchies, 823; representatives of,
867; rise of, 62, 812
Paris, 79, 83
Paris, peace of, 127
Paris, Treaty of (1951), 1415, 232, 234
Parliamentary Assembly (Council of
Europe), 233
parliaments, 27, 28
parochialism, 73
Partido Popular (PP), 329
(PSOE),
Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol
329
Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS),
3023
Patat, Jean-Pierre, 2834
patriotism, 76, 301, 327
Paul, Saint, 133
PDS. See Party of Democratic Socialism
peace, 7, 14, 99100, 117, 2034, 334, 341
peasants, 134, 160
Penn, William, Present and Future Peace of
Europe, 175
peoples spring, 182
Perpetual Peace a Philosophical Sketch
(Kant), 6, 175, 3323, 3356, 341, 351
Persians, 34, 49
Pesaro, 117
Peter, Saint, 133
Peter the Great, 46, 58, 656
Philip of Macedon, 39
Philip II, 43
Philosophical and Political History of the
Two Indies (Raynal and Diderot), 64, 65
philosophy, 1011
Phoenicians, 34, 57
Piedmontese, 31
Pitt, William, 47
Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace
(Bentham), 175
pluralism, 12, 1718; cultural, 512, 225,
3256, 33940, 344
Poland, 58, 68, 75, 76, 80; partition of, 65,
66
Poles, 61, 69, 219

374

Index

police actions, 2489

polis, 401
political parties: German, 288, 298300,
3023; Spanish, 329
political unions, 39, 54
Politicke consideration (De la Court), 106
politics, 40, 73, 91, 98, 127, 134; and
Christianity, 1012; de la Court on,
923; European identity and, 2056; of
identity, 2878; individual and,
11314; minority representation in,
2223; Muslim representation in, 221,
2237; Spanish, 32730
Polo, Marco, 85
population, during High Middle Ages, 789
Portugal, 6, 75, 205, 238; and European
Community, 237, 23940
Portuguese, 74
power, 64; and contract, 45; military, 9,
63, 678
PP. See Partido Popular
Prague, 58
Present and Future Peace of Europe (Penn),
175
prince-bishoprics, 8
printing press, 63
priories, 87
Prodi, Romano, 8
progress, 1956, 3412
Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en
Europe (Saint Pierre), 14, 175
property rights, 139, 152, 216; agriculture
and, 489; naming system and, 1602
Protestants, 3, 13, 62;
Protestantism, 93, 100; politics and,
1012, 1034
Proudhon, Joseph, The Federative
Principle, 184
Prussia, 119, 128
Prussian empire, 65, 67
PSOE. See Partido Socialista Obrero

Espanol
public reason, 3556
Pufendorf, Samuel, 512, 98
Purchas, Samuel, 35, 49, 50
Pythagoras, 38
Quadruple Alliance, 128
quality of life, 201
Quebec, 140, 152, 325
Rabinow, Paul, 149
racism, 53
rationalism, 1489
Rawls, John, 347, 355
Raynal, Abbe (Guillame-ThomasFrancois), 62, 66; Philosophical and
Political History of the Two Indies, 64,
65

rebellion and national identity, 1545

Reconquest, 320
Reed-Danahay, Deborah, 1467
Reformation, 22, 89, 222
Regional Committee, 186
regionalism, 31, 172, 186, 317
religion, 13, 35, 43, 50, 64, 133, 222;
dogmatism in, 91, 93; in Dutch
Republic, 1013; in society, 1034;
tolerance of, 978, 100
Remonstrants, 102
Renan, Ernest, 178, 188, 325
Renner, Karl, 1845
Reorganisation de la societe europeenne
(Saint Simon and Thierry), 180
republicanism, 4, 56, 92, 332, 333; Dutch,
934, 959, 10613, 11415; European,
37, 38; historical definition of, 945
republique des lettres, 119
resistance, 1645
Reuter, Ernst, 299
revolution, 19, 153. See also French
Revolution
Rhone Alps, 186
Ricci, Matteo, 50
Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 51
Rise of Christian Europe, The
(Trevor-Roper), 215, 216
Rise of Possessive Individualism, The
(Macpherson), 139
Risorgimento, 183
Robertson, William, 9, 62, 634
Robespierre, Maximilien-FrancoisMarie-Isidore de, 30
Roman Catholic Church: alienism and,
878; cosmopolitanism of, 867;
hegemony of, 756; historical records of,
767; instutionalization of, 812; papacy
and, 889; reform in, 823. See also
Catholic Church, Roman Catholicism
Roman Catholicism, 295, 327. See also
Catholic Church, Roman Catholic
Church
Roman Empire, 42, 43, 45, 59, 131, 134,
136, 214
Romanov family, 47
Rome, 8, 34, 38, 88, 118, 131; as
community, 412; laws of, 423
Rome, Treaty of (1957), 232, 235, 237,
242, 287, 297, 300
Rossini, Gioacchino: Le Comte Ory, 116;
Il Viaggio a Reims, 11617, 125
Rougemont, Denis de, 179
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 23, 30, 43, 46,
115, 173, 356; Considerations sur le
gouvernement de Pologne, 174
Ruhr River, 234
rural life, 3940, 73, 79

Index
Rusconi, Gian Enrico, 200
Russell, Bertrand, History of Western
Philosophy, 149
Russia, 58, 67, 70, 219; Europe and, 118,
201; Voltaire on, 656
Russians, 34, 61, 69, 217; as other, 467
Russian Orthodoxy, 35, 75
Saar River, 234
Said, Edward, 335, 343, 345; Culture and
Imperialism, 3367
Saint-Exupery, Patrick, 213
St. Just, 30
Saint Pierre, Charles Irenee, Abbe de, Projet
pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en
Europe, 14, 175
Saint Simon, Henri de, 13, 22, 180;
Reorganisation de la societe
europeenne, ou de la necessite et des
moyens de rassembler les peuples
dEurope en un seul corps politque en
conservant a` chacun sa nationalite, 180
Salomon, Jacques, 2778
Samuelson, Paul, 280
Savoy, 121
Scandinavia, 58, 75. See also various
countries
Scandinavians, 74, 81
Scharping, Rudolf, 310
Schlegel, A. W., 1734
Schlegel brothers, 17
Schmid, Carlo, 299
Schmidt, Helmut, 267, 299
scholasticism, 73; Latin and, 835;
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century,
767
Schroeder, Gerhard, 229, 288, 310
Schumacher, Kurt, 299
Schuman, Robert, 8, 233, 234
science, 10; European, Christian, 4950
Scotland, 31, 74, 145, 325. See also United
Kingdom
SEA. See Single European Act
Second Republic (Spain), 32738
Second Treatise on Government (Locke),
48
self, 142, 167, 347; in Greece, 1578;
resistance and, 1645
selfhood, 25; and individualism, 16970
self-categorization, 2912
Self Consciousness (Cohen), 143
self-determination, 5, 21
self-government, 3501
separatism, 31, 172
Serbia, 60
Serbs, 61
Seven Years War (French and Indian War),
1415, 65

375

Shaftsbury, earl of, 115

shepherds, Greek, 157, 158
Shoah, 196
Sidney, Algernon, 115
Siecle de Louis XV, Le (Voltaire), 175
Single European Act (SEA), 231, 2434,
262, 267
Skinner, Quentin, 115
slavery, 5, 61
Slavic countries, 61. See also various
countries
Slovakia, 75
Slovenia, 219
Smith, Adam, 50, 956, 114
Smith, Anthony, 289
social class, 122. See also elites
social Darwinism, 328
Social Democratic Party (SPD), 20, 288,
304; and Euro, 30910; policy programs
of, 299300; and united Europe, 2989
socialism, 219; German, 2989, 3023
Socialist Movement for the United States of
Europe, 299
society, 164, 324; Greek views of, 401;
modern, 2930; progress in, 3412
sociocentrism, 143, 154, 170
Solow, Robert, 280

Solozabal,
J. J., 326
Soto, Domingo de, 15
Southern Question (Italy), 183
sovereignty, 28, 65, 96, 97, 11314, 158,
187, 2601, 302; European
Community and, 242, 2434, 2534;
European Monetary Union and, 2646,
278; Federal Republic of Germany,
2978; Spinoza on, 11112
Soviet Union, 30, 47, 69, 145, 179, 192,
194, 201, 230; collapse of, 231, 232,
250, 268; as other, 295, 296
Spaak, Paul-Henri, 233, 235
space, complex vs. simple, 226
Spain, 6, 46, 57, 65, 74, 75, 123, 205, 217,
239, 323; colonialism in, 15, 145; and
European Community, 237, 240,
258n78; Francoism and, 322, 3289;
legitimacy, 32930; nationalisms in,
31719, 326; as nation-state, 3201;
and Netherlands, 13, 96, 978, 1078;
political factions in, 32730
SPD. See Social Democratic Party
Spinelli, Altiero, 8, 1819, 242
Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 96; on religion and
state, 1034; on sovereignty, 11112;
works of, 98
stability pact, for European Monetary
Union, 2823
Stadhouder, 97, 102, 106, 111
Stael, Germaine de, 17, 124; works of, 125

376

Index

state(s), 8, 9, 14, 22, 30, 63, 119, 222, 332;

Congress of Vienna and, 1278;
constitutional, 56; development of,
1315; independent, 333, 339;
operation of, 2, 3
States General, 97, 101, 102
states-system, 63, 66
stereotyping: and national consciousness,
1734; self-, 166, 167
Stirner, Max, 328
Stoiber, Prime Minister, 309
Strabo, 4, 37, 39, 41
Stradanus, Johannes, 50
Sully, Duc de, Grand Design and, 14, 54
Swabey, Marie, 221
Sweden, 58, 238, 239, 285
Switzerland, 121, 234, 238, 239, 254
symbolism, 25, 146
Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe, 48
tariffs, 256, 2589
Taylor, Charles, 339, 344, 354
technology, 50, 63, 68, 78
Terrio, Susan, 168
territory, Greek issues of, 1634
Terror, the, 21
Thatcher, Margaret, 142, 229
Thatcherism, 142, 144
Thermidorian regime, 120
Thierry, Augustin, Reorganisation de la
societe europeenne, 180
Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 6
Thierse, Wolfgang, 2, 304
Thirty Years War, 13
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 73
Thomasius, Christian, 84
Thomas of Strasbourg, 86
Thouros (Velestinlis), 181
Thrace, 60
Tiepolo, Giambattista, 51
Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and the
European States, 9901990, 31718
Tindermans, Leo, 241
Tindermans Report, 241
Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel
de, 5, 48
tolerance, 1001, 102, 332
Toulon, 46
Tractarianism, 222
Tractatus Politicus (Spinoza), 98, 112
Tractatus Theologico-politicus (Spinoza),
98
trade, 73, 74; European Community and,
254, 255, 2567; international, 15, 73,
79, 2389
Trappenhaus, 51
treaties, 64, 123, 254; European Union
and, 278, 229. See also by name

Treaty on European Union. See Maastricht

Treaty
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 216; The Rise of
Christian Europe, 215, 216
Troy, 345
Turkey, 1213, 68, 239; and European
Community, 211, 234; Ottoman
hegemony of, 46, 61; as threat, 21213.
See also Ottoman Empire
Turks, 61, 153; as other, 4950; as threat,
21213
Tuscany, 79
Twelve Years Truce, 96, 97
Tyre, 34
de Centro Democratico

UCD. See Union

Ukraine, 68
Ukrainians, 61
Ultramontanism, 222
unification, 2, 9, 11, 22, 17980, 183, 185,
232, 287; commerce and, 1819;
European, 171, 181, 192, 22930, 244;
Germany and, 2989
uniformity, 124, 125, 126, 222
de Centro Democratico

Union
(UCD), 329
United Kingdom, 22, 29, 31, 48, 65, 67,
68, 69, 192, 205, 215, 223, 227n35,
229, 233, 234, 245, 256, 258n78, 323;
colonialism of, 10, 15, 145; and EFTA,
238, 239; and European Community,
230, 231, 237, 242, 243; and European
Monetary Union, 263, 282, 285;
imperialism of, 19, 67; individualism in,
153, 154
United Nations, 146, 213, 334
United Provinces. See Dutch Republic
United States, 26, 689, 177, 192, 230,
234, 323, 333, 352; and currency
fluctuation, 2667; disorder in, 1534;
and European Monetary Union, 2767,
284; individualism in, 13940
United States of Europe, 176, 177, 178,
184, 192, 230, 298, 31415
unity: European, 17, 192, 219, 2956,
2989, 31516; spiritual, 1978
universalism, 81, 123, 134, 168, 175;
French Revolution and, 1201, 122
universities, 834
University of Leipzig, 84
upper class, 85
Ural Mountains, 47, 58
urban life, 40, 49, 80, 130
Urla, Jacqueline, 146
Uruguay Round, 255
Utrecht, Treaty of, 14, 64, 65, 66, 96
vagabonds, 72
Valery, 206

Index

377

Valmy, battle of, 178

van de Klashorst, 112
van Gelderen, 112
Van Gend en Loos, 256, 258
Vatra, 181
Vattel, Emeric de, Le Droit des gens, ou
principes de la loi naturelle appliques a
la conduite et aux affaires des nations et
des souverains, 48
Vauvenargues, 96
Velestinlis, Rhigas, 18; Thouros, 181
Velthuysen, Lambertus van, 98
Venice, 79, 123, 134
Ventotene, 192

Verbruderung,
132
Vernier, Bernard, 161
Versailles, Congress of, 173
Versailles, Treaty of, 15
Vespucci, Amerigo, 50
Viaggio a Reims, Il (Rossini), 11617, 125
Vico, Giambattista, 148, 149
Vielfalt Europas, Die (Gadamer), 197
Vienna, Congress of, geographic changes,
1278
Vikings, 74
villages, autonomy of, 73
violence, 212
Virgil, Aeneid, 345
Vitoria, Francisco de, 15
Vives, Juan Luis, 14, 175
Voltaire, 9, 37, 40, 62, 63, 118, 119; Age
of Louis XIV, 64; History of Russia
under Peter the Great, 58, 656; Le
siecle de Louis XV, 175
Von Ribbentrop, 191
Vorstius, Conrad, 101

Weber, Max, 8, 129, 138; on citizenship,

1317; works of, 130
Wehner, Herbert, 299
Weimar Republic, 295
welfare, 91
Welsh, 31
Werner Report, 266
Western Europe, 201
Western European Union, 303
Western European Union Treaty, 233
West Germany, 69, 296, 2689, 31415.
See also Germany
Westphalia, Peace of, 13, 14, 64, 94, 96,
98; republicanism and, 1078
WEU. See Western European Union
What Is Enlightenment? (Kant), 334
White Paper, 2423, 244
Williams, Raymond, 215
William II of Orange, 98, 109
William III, 95, 96, 106
Wilson, James, 41
Wilson, Woodrow, 3334, 339
Wintle, Michael, 214
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Weber), 130
Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe,
667
Wolsey, Cardinal, 87
Worcester v. the State of Georgia, 352
workers international, 1834
World Trade Organization (WTO), 232,
255
World War I, 185, 192
World War II, 20, 185, 191, 192, 233, 312
Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 3378
WTO. See World Trade Organization
Wurzburg, Prince-Bishops of, 51

Waigel, Theo, 313

Wars of the Fronde, 64
Wars of Religion, 64, 65
Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 64
warfare, 7, 1314, 68, 342; France and,
11920, 121; and national identity,
1789; Spanish-Dutch, 1078
Wassenaer, Gerard van, 10910; Arcana in
Republics and Principalities, 105

Young, Iris Marion, 3578

Young Europe (Mazzini), 181, 182
Young Italy (Mazzini), 181
Yugoslavia, 146, 185, 201
Zabusky, Stacia, 146
Zentrum, 295
Zeus, 34
Zollverein, 176

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