“Neither the West nor the East will rescue Europe,” wrote Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923; “Russia wants to conquer it, America wants to buy it.” Damned as a “cosmopolitan bastard” by Adolf Hitler, the Japanese-born Bohemian count would become the inspiration for resistance hero Viktor Laszlo in Casablanca, and his words have gained eerie prescience.
Invasion from the East, domination by superpowers, and global irrelevance are all possibilities for Europe’s future. The threat is not the benign “end of history”, writes Roderick Beaton in his sweeping new continental history, but “a literal end to the history of Europe”.
That history is well-worn, and Beaton begins by asking “why might we need” a new one at all. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Trumpian takeover of Washington have been “a turning of the kaleidoscope”: changes that make “the whole pattern” of past and present look different.
“Making sense of the things that happen” has been Beaton’s life’s work, a “personal odyssey” of a career that began when he left his native Scotland for Greece in 1973, the year the UK joined the EEC [now the EU]. He has become a leading historian of modern Greece, but Beaton tries to avoid “parcelling out the subject into the separate stories of regions or nations”, a narrative rhythm he believes bogs down even the most engaging histories that try to cover so much. Instead he aims to focus on “Europe, as a whole”.
“Objectively, Europe doesn’t even exist”, its boundaries invented by people, not geography. It was created by the “revisionist myth-making” of Herodotus, “the first historian” recasting a complex regional war between the ancient Iranians and Athenians into the salvation of a continent. Thousands of years later, John Stuart Mill would still believe that if the Greeks had lost the Battle of Marathon, we “might still have been wandering in the woods”. “We are all Greeks,” Percy Bysshe Shelley declared; “our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.”
It wasn’t what happened at Marathon that was important, but “the telling of the story afterwards”. The classical Greeks indulged in a new self-aggrandising narrative of their own place in the world, while the Romans would go even further. The Greek geographer Strabo (a Roman citizen) began his world geography in the first century by noting Europe’s “natural genius towards excellence in men and government”, and how conducive it was to “urban constitutional life”, something Rome was bringing to the “antisocial” and “savage”.
The narrative has never gone away. “Europe is a Continent that has brought forth civilisation”, declared the original preamble of the scrapped EU constitution. But this collective identity has been a result of choices, rather than something inherent, and Beaton argues that Europe has always been “as much an idea as a place”. Even though it is told chronologically – a masterfully fluid and readable narrative of the last 2,500 years – this is a history of ideas.
The idea of Europe has always required the idea of somewhere else. Even the universalising Roman Empire, whose influence still shapes so much of the Continent, would eventually find itself “putting up border fences to keep the rest of the world out”. The eternally awaited “barbarians” – Persians, Goths, Huns, Mongols, Arabs, Turks, Russians – have been, in the words of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, “a kind of solution”: their looming presence made Europe real.
The Continent, however, has never been closed, and Beaton is at pains to point out how Europe could be an inclusive idea as much as an exclusionary one. Indeed the invaders who stayed have generally “become European”, adopting “much of the way of life of those they had conquered”.
The Ottomans and the Russians explicitly chose European-facing capitals for their empires, and agonised over how much to adapt to those who both feared and courted them. “I am European, and I love Europe,” waxed Ivan Turgenev. Fyodor Dostoevsky by contrast felt that “we might as well be on the moon”. Gottfried Leibniz reflected European apprehension when dubbing the Europeanising Tsar Peter the Great “the Turk of the North”.
The threat from the East has been definingly existential. It was in a chronicle of the 732 Battle of Poitiers, where the Islamic conquest was halted, that the Continent’s people were first called “Europeans”. And it was the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 that led Pius II to resurrect that term in defence of “our fatherland, our home” (before trying, unsuccessfully, to get Mehmed the Conqueror to convert to Christianity).
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The emperor who founded the iconic city on the Bosphorus had Europeanised that Middle Eastern faith, and Constantine’s institution of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire transformed the idea and identity of Europe. Throughout the medieval and early modern centuries, Europe was synonymous with what was called in Latin the “res publica Christiana”, and for all its divisions and eventual “breaking up” during the Reformation’s war of ideas, religion kept a sense of connection from Ireland to the Baltic, from the Mediterranean and the North Sea.
The power of the East led Europeans to turn to the ocean of the West, and set in motion centuries of colonial expansion. “It was Europe that did this”, Beaton argues, “not Spain, or Portugal, or France, or England, or the Netherlands”: sailors, soldiers, bankers, priests, traders, and more from all across the Continent. “All Europe,” Joseph Conrad would later write of the ivory trader at the heart of darkness, “contributed to the making of Kurtz.”
‘Certainly today’s superpowers give us many defensive reasons to be European. But we need positive ideas too, not least because of those who would drag us back to the horrors of racial nationalism’
European ideas of race and superiority justified conquest and slavery and genocide, even as many contemporaries decried how those crimes violated the humanist and “enlightened” ideas developing back home. Beaton perhaps does not explore distinctiveness enough – why could the Enlightenment “never have arisen anywhere but in Europe”? – but he wisely notes that whether we “like it or not”, we are heirs to a “divided and divisive legacy”. Perhaps “it’s the contradictions, every bit as much as the achievements and the atrocities, that define this particular civilization”.
Contradictory capitalism does not receive enough attention, nor do ideas about gender. But Beaton skilfully charts his way through the twists and turns of Europe’s last 250 years of political upheaval without losing sight of the questions of division and unity that have defined them. The state system that grew from religious war and imperialism split the Continent up, but European exceptionalism and the “balance of power” meant it also kept it together. “Today,” Rousseau wrote in 1771, “nobody is French, German, Spanish, even English any more, no matter what people say; there are only Europeans.”
Revolution and war would continually prove that wrong, but ideas of unity and diversity existed in a dynamic symbiosis. Watching the Prussian invasion of France in 1871, Victor Hugo called for a “United States of Europe”. Even if that was not yet possible, the orientalist Ernest Renan wrote, the Continent was already “a confederation of states united by the shared idea of civilization”. But the “Realpolitik” of the age disagreed: “whoever speaks of Europe”, Bismarck fumed, “is wrong”.
Colonising and “civilising” would take European power, guns and ideas to every corner of the world, and by the 1800s their global dominance was unmatched. So too was the rate of scientific and economic “progress” they had set in motion, “at a terrible cost”. “But with supremacy,” Beaton writes, “came the fear of losing it.” Imperial rivalry, nationalism and totalitarianism would tear Europe itself apart in wars that would engulf the globe, and the horrors inflicted on other continents would also be wreaked by Europeans on each other.
From those ashes came again the questions of unity and diversity, and the eternal anxiety about the bigger powers to the East and now the West too. There was now “only one way of playing a decisive role in the world”, said Konrad Adenauer in 1956: “to unite to make Europe”.
Our own small island has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of that project, and there is much for us to think about in Beaton’s attempts to answer “questions about the nature of nations, particularly small ones, and how they relate to the larger whole that is Europe”. He cautions against the risk of “ending up like the city states of the ancient Greeks”, so obsessed with preserving autonomy and difference that you fall “into the grip of a more ruthless neighbour”.
Certainly today’s superpowers give us many defensive reasons to be European. But we need positive ideas too, not least because of those who would drag us back to the horrors of racial nationalism while rejecting “the millennia-old movement of peoples”. This is a vitally timely book, and Beaton concludes by asking whether citizens can come together in a “collective identity for Europe”, one that draws on history but is not bound by it. It might seem unlikely, but “if the study of history tells us anything, it is that things never turn out in the way you might expect”.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and the host of Ireland’s Edge
Further Reading
How The World Made The West: A 4000-Year History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Josephine Quinn
Quinn shows how since ancient times it has been Europe’s encounters with the rest of the world that have defined it.
Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders (Hodder, 2024) by Lewis Baston
From the divisions and fringes of the Continent, Baston offers a unique perspective on modern European history.
The West: A New History of An Old Idea (WH Allen, 2023) by Naoíse Mac Sweeney
Through 14 lives, Mac Sweeney explores how Europeans and Americans have constructed ideas of themselves and their place in the world.