Europe: A History (4 page)

Distortion is a necessary characteristic of all sources of information. Absolute objectivity is absolutely unattainable. Every technique has its strengths and its weaknesses. The important thing is to understand where the value and the distortions of each technique lie, and to arrive at a reasonable approximation. Critics who object to the historian’s use of poetry, or sociology or astrology, or whatever, on the grounds that such sources are ‘subjective’ or ‘partial’ or ‘unscientific’, are stating the obvious. It is as though one could object to X-ray pictures of the skeleton, or ultra-sound scans of the womb, on the grounds that they give a pretty poor image of the human face. Medical doctors use every known device for prying open the secrets of the human mind and body. Historians need a similar range of equipment for penetrating the mysteries of the past.

Documentary history, which has enjoyed a long innings, is simultaneously one of the most valuable and the most risky lines of approach. Treated with incaution, it is open to gross forms of misrepresentation; and there are huge areas of past experience which it is incapable of recording. Yet no one can deny that historical documents remain one of the most fruitful veins of knowledge,
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Lord Acton, founder of the Cambridge school of history, once predicted a specially deleterious effect of documentary history. It tends to give priority to the amassing of evidence over the historian’s interpretation of evidence. [We live] ‘in a documentary age,’ Acton wrote some ninety years ago, ‘which will tend to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing.’
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Generally speaking, historians have given more thought to their own debates than to the problems encountered by their long-suffering readers. The pursuit of scientific objectivity has done much to reduce earlier flights of fancy, and to separate fact from fiction. At the same time it has reduced the number of instruments which historians can use to transmit their discoveries. For it is not sufficient for the good historian merely to establish the facts and to muster the evidence. The other half of the task is to penetrate the readers’ minds, to do battle with all the distorting perceptors with which every consumer of history is equipped. These perceptors include not only all five physical senses but also a complex of pre-set intellectual circuits, varying from linguistic terminology, geographical names, and symbolic codes to political opinions, social conventions, emotional disposition, religious beliefs, visual memory, and traditional historical knowledge. Every consumer of history has a store of previous experience through which all incoming information about the past must be filtered.

For this reason, effective historians must devote as much care to transmitting their information as to collecting and shaping it. In this part of their work, they share many of the same preoccupations as poets, writers, and artists. They must keep an eye on the work of all the others who help to mould and to transmit our impressions of the past—the art historians, the musicologists, the museologues,
the archivists, the illustrators, the cartographers, the diarists and biographers, the sound-recordists, the film-makers, the historical novelists, even the purveyors of ‘bottled medieval air’. At every stage the key quality, as first defined by Vico, is that of ‘creative historical imagination’. Without it, the work of the historian remains a dead letter, an unbroadcast message,
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In this supposedly scientific age, the imaginative side of the historical profession has undoubtedly been downgraded. The value of unreadable academic papers and of undigested research data is exaggerated. Imaginative historians such as Thomas Carlyle, have not simply been censured for an excess of poetic licence. They have been forgotten. Yet Carlyle’s convictions on the relationship of history and poetry are at least worthy of consideration.
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It is important to check and to verify, as Carlyle sometimes failed to do. But ‘telling it right’ is also important. All historians must tell their tale convincingly, or be ignored.

‘Postmodernism’ has been a pastime in recent years for all those who give precedence to the study of historians over the study of the past. It refers to a fashion which has followed in the steps of the two French gurus, Foucault and Derrida, and which has attacked both the accepted canon of historical knowledge and the principles of conventional methodology. In one line of approach, it has sought to demolish the value of documentary source materials in the way that literary deconstructionists have sought to dismantle the ‘meaning’ of literary texts. Elsewhere it has denounced ‘the tyranny of facts’ and the ‘authoritarian ideologies’ which are thought to lurk behind every body of information. At the extreme, it holds that all statements about past reality are ‘coercive’. And the purveyors of that coercion include all historians who argue for ‘a commitment to human values’. In the eyes of its critics, it has reduced history to ‘the pleasure of the historian’; and it has become an instrument for politicized radicals with an agenda of their own. In its contempt for prescribed data, it hints that knowing something is more dangerous than knowing nothing.
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Yet the phenomenon has raised more problems than it solves. Its enthusiasts can only be likened to those lugubrious academics who, instead of telling jokes, write learned tomes on the analysis of humour. One also wonders whether conventional liberal historiography can properly be defined as ‘modernist’; and whether ‘post-modernist’ ought not to be reserved for those who are trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. It is all very well to deride the authority of all and sundry; but it only leads in the end to the deriding of Derrida. It is only a matter of time before the deconstructionists are deconstructed by their own techniques. ‘We have survived the “Death of God” and the “Death of Man”. We will surely survive “the Death of History” … and the death of postmodernism.’
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But to return to the question of magnification. Any narrative which chronicles the march of history over long periods is bound to be differently designed from the
panorama which co-ordinates all the features relevant to a particular stage or moment. The former, chronological approach has to emphasize innovative events and movements which, though untypical at the time of their first appearance, will gain prominence at a later date. The latter, synchronic approach has to combine both the innovative and the traditional, and their interactions. The first risks anachronism, the second immobility.

Early modern Europe has served as one of the laboratories for these problems. Once dominated by historians exploring the roots of humanism, protestantism, capitalism, science, and the nation-state, it then attracted the attention of specialists who showed, quite correctly, how elements of the medieval and pagan worlds had survived and thrived. The comprehensive historian must somehow strike a balance between the two. In describing the sixteenth century, for example, it is as misguided to write exclusively about witches, alchemists, and fairies as it once was to write almost exclusively about Luther, Copernicus, or the rise of the English Parliament. Comprehensive history must take note of the specialists’ debate, but it must equally find a way to rise above their passing concerns.

Concepts of Europe

‘Europe’ is a relatively modern idea. It gradually replaced the earlier concept of ‘Christendom’ in a complex intellectual process lasting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The decisive period, however, was reached in the decades on either side of 1700 after generations of religious conflict. In that early phase of the Enlightenment (see Chapter VIII) it became an embarrassment for the divided community of nations to be reminded of their common Christian identity; and ‘Europe’ filled the need for a designation with more neutral connotations. In the West, the wars against Louis XIV inspired a number of publicists who appealed for common action to settle the divisions of the day. The much-imprisoned Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), son of an Anglo-Dutch marriage and founder of Pennsylvania, had the distinction of advocating both universal toleration and a European parliament. The dissident French abbé, Charles Castel de St Pierre (1658–1743), author of
Projet d’une paix perpétuelle
(1713), called for a confederation of European powers to guarantee a lasting peace. In the East, the emergence of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great required radical rethinking of the international framework. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 provided the last major occasion when public reference to the
Respublica Christiana
, the ‘Christian Commonwealth’, was made.

After that, the awareness of a European as opposed to a Christian community gained the upper hand. Writing in 1751, Voltaire described Europe as:

a kind of great republic divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed… but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions. They all have the same principle of public law and politics, unknown in other parts of the world.
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Twenty years later, Rousseau announced: ‘There are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, or even English, but only Europeans.’ According to one judgement, the final realization of the ‘idea of Europe’ took place in 1796, when Edmund Burke wrote: ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.’
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Even so, the geographical, cultural, and political parameters of the European community have always remained open to debate. In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unintelligible poems entitled ‘Europe: A Prophecy’, he illustrated it with a picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens and holding a pair of compasses.
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Most of Europe’s outline is determined by its extensive sea-coasts. But the delineation of its land frontier was long in the making. The dividing line between Europe and Asia had been fixed by the ancients from the Hellespont to the River Don, and it was still there in medieval times. A fourteenth-century encyclopedist could produce a fairly precise definition:

‘Europe is said to be a third of the whole world, and has its name from Europa, daughter of Agenor, King of Libya. Jupiter ravished this Europa, and brought her to Crete, and called most of the land after her Europa… Europe begins on the river Tanay [Don] and stretches along the Northern Ocean to the end of Spain. The east and south part rises from the sea called Pontus [Black Sea] and is all joined to the Great Sea [the Mediterranean] and ends at the islands of Cadiz [Gibraltar]…’
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Pope Pius II (Enea Piccolomini) began his early
Treatise on the State of Europe
(1458) with a description of Hungary, Transylvania, and Thrace, which at that juncture were under threat from the Turks.

Neither the ancients nor the medievals had any close knowledge of the easterly reaches of the European Plain, several sections of which were not permanently settled until the eighteenth century. So it was not until 1730 that a Swedish officer in the Russian service called Strahlenberg suggested that Europe’s boundary should be pushed back from the Don to the Ural Mountains and the Ural River. Sometime in the late eighteenth century, the Russian government erected a boundary post on the trail between Yekaterinburg and Tyumen to mark the frontier of Europe and Asia. From then on the gangs of Tsarist exiles, who were marched to Siberia in irons, created the custom of kneeling by the post and of scooping up a last handful of European earth. ‘There is no other boundary post in the whole world’, wrote one observer, ‘which has seen … so many broken hearts.’
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By 1833, when Volger’s
Handbuch der Geographie was
published, the idea of’Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ had gained general acceptance.
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None the less, there is nothing sacred about the reigning convention. The extension of Europe to the Urals was accepted as a result of the rise of the Russian Empire. But it has been widely criticized, especially by analytical geographers. The frontier on the Urals had little validity in the eyes of Halford Mackinder, of Arnold Toynbee, for whom environmental factors had primacy, or of the Swiss geographer, J. Reynold, who wrote that ‘Russia is the geographical antithesis of Europe’. The decline of Russian power could well invoke a revision—in which
case the views of a Russian-born Oxford professor about a ‘tidal Europe’, whose frontiers ebb and flow, would be borne out.
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Geographical Europe has always had to compete with notions of Europe as a cultural community, and in the absence of common political structures, European civilization could only be defined by cultural criteria. Special emphasis is usually placed on the seminal role of Christianity, a role which did not cease when the label of Christendom was dropped.

Broadcasting to a defeated Germany in 1945, the poet T. S. Eliot expounded the view that European civilization stands in mortal peril after repeated dilutions of the Christian core. He described ‘the closing of Europe’s mental frontiers’ that had occurred during the years which had seen the nation-states assert themselves to the full. ‘A kind of cultural autarchy followed inevitably on political and economic autarchy,’ he said. He stressed the organic nature of culture: ‘Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature …’ He stressed the interdependence of the numerous sub-cultures within the European family. What he called cultural ‘trade’ was the organism’s lifeblood. And he stressed the special duty of men of letters. Above all, he stressed the centrality of the Christian tradition, which subsumes within itself’the legacy of Greece, of Rome, and of Israel’:

‘The dominant feature in creating a common culture between peoples, each of which has its own distinct culture, is religion…. I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all… depend on [the Christian heritage] for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith.’
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