A Short History of Europe

Introduction

The cliffs of Cape St Vincent stand high and wild on the Portuguese coast, forming the south-west tip of Europe. Here we can watch the sun sink at dusk into the Atlantic, where the earliest Europeans believed they had reached the end of the world. Each night they thought they were seeing their source of heat and light extinguished by the ocean, to be reborn the following morning. I know of nowhere more conducive to such myths. Beyond these barren cliffs the viewer sees nothing but an eternity of sea. Behind is a land mass over which have rolled waves of tempestuous history.

Europe is primarily a modest peninsula off the north-west corner of Asia. It extends from the Portuguese coast north to the Arctic, south to the Mediterranean and east to the Caucasus and Ural mountains, where a rough metal sign by a road marks an arbitrary boundary. This continent has no deserts and just one notable mountain range, the Alps. Mostly it is fertile alluvial plain under a temperate sky, home to 750 million people, or more than twice the population of the USA.

Europe has no claim to pre-eminence among the world’s agglomerations of peoples. Others can rival it in size, civilization and prosperity. Its emergence into imperial dominance towards the end of the second millennium was spectacular and short lived. But Europe’s diversity and military supremacy, its dynamism and economic energy, its scientific prowess and cultural creativity give it a special place in human history. Even today, in a period of relative decline, it remains a magnet to refugees, migrants, scholars and travellers from across the world.

The word Europe emerged in the sixth century BC as referring to the mainland north of Greece. It has never had agreed borders. At first it was synonymous with the Roman empire and then with Christendom, both of which extended beyond the limits of present-day Europe to embrace large tracts of Asia and Africa. The eastern boundary has never been fixed but is generally accepted as the Urals, the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains. This includes European Russia but excludes Turkey east of the Bosphorus as well as Georgia.

Any short history of this continent is essentially about its politics, the struggle of people for power over land. Hobbes declared that humans are born to perpetual conflict. Whether that conflict need be violent remains an open question, but Europe’s story starts with those who were successful in battle, with the rulers rather than those they ruled. This is a narrative of power in a continent whose story, at least until recently, has been dominated by the practice of war, and therefore by the processes by which wars are prepared and concluded. Even today, Europeans seem unable to find a constitutional formula for living at peace with each other. They argue incessantly over what is meant by ‘Europe’.

I am aware that history is the home to controversy. Some historians will regard a political approach to Europe’s story as partial, seeing it as shutting out those who were victims of power, variously the poor, the enslaved, women, immigrants and outsiders. They all have their histories, as ‘valid’ as mine. So too would foreigners who lived under Europe’s imperial yoke see Europe in a different light. I can only repeat that this book is about the wielding and distribution of power in the narrative of one continent. It must stand as the beginning of all other narratives.

Mine is a conventional history. I have divided Europe’s story into periods. Most broadly they are the classical world, the Middle Ages, the growth of states, and the modern era. The first embraces Greece and Rome. The second covers the triumph of Christendom, first around the Mediterranean and then over northern Europe, coupled with the rise of the Holy Roman Empire and the coming of Islam to the Mediterranean basin. The third period sees the rise of nations, the wars of religion and succession, and the ideological revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I end with the cataclysms of the past century, and the reconstruction of the continent we know today.

Along the way I have indicated the controversies that have dogged Europe’s history, in the hope that readers may be encouraged to dig further. I am aware that views diverge over any division of Europe’s story into ‘ages’. They differ over the relative importance of Greece and Rome to classical culture; over the significance of Byzantium in Europe’s evolution; over the impact on the continent of the Muslim invasions; over the role of the church in Europe’s many conflicts, and its role in spurring, or impeding, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. I can only nod at these differences in passing.

This is a history of Europe, not of the nations of Europe. It is an attempt to describe how a group of states, interacting with each other over time, developed a collective, continental consciousness. Geography means that some regions are more critical to that development than others, and this has guided my narrative. We shift from the eastern to the western Mediterranean, then north of the Alps to the great river basins of central Europe. France, Germany and their immediate neighbours have remained at the heart of the European story for the past millennium, and do to this day. Likewise Iberia, the British Isles, Scandinavia and eastern Europe have played more spasmodic and peripheral roles. I realize this leaves many countries out of the picture, and can seem cursory to those whose native country is omitted. My father’s land of Wales does not play a role. But this is a story of Europe as a whole, not of its component parts.

My focus is chiefly on those individuals whose activities have been a part of that story and spread their influence beyond their national boundaries, leaders such as Augustus, Charlemagne, Innocent III, Charles V, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Hitler and Gorbachev. As a student of economics, I am aware of the role of resources and money in politics, but this is not an economic history. Nor is it a cultural one. I mention Europe’s rich cast-list of artists, writers and musicians, and its leading intellectual figures where I feel they illuminate the central story. Hence we meet Socrates, Aristotle, Gregory the Great, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel and Marx. They are the Greek chorus to the ever-pressing drama of these times.

Various themes surface in the course of the narrative, serving to bind it together. One is the extraordinary role of violence, and the technology of violence, in that narrative, at least until very recently. Another is the dualism of Hellenistic and Roman culture on the one hand, and Christian ethics and belief on the other. Both influences projected an external moral authority over the individual, but also stirred ideas of the individual as a force against that authority, whether embodied in church or state. Two further themes are the restless search, from the Greeks onwards, to legitimate governing power and relate it to consent, and the creative energy of trade and then of capital to drive forward the emergence of nation states. A final theme is how these forces brought the continent close to self-destruction in the twentieth century. From that crisis forged Europe’s most benign legacy to the modern world, the idea of a social market economy under a democratic regime.

I have kept the narrative strictly chronological, because I believe history acquires meaning only if we can see effect following cause over time. Therefore, wherever possible I have avoided detours, backtracking or leaps forward. I have omitted anything that does not, in some sense, carry the story’s central thrust while giving pen portraits of people and ideas that are important to that story. It drives towards what I hesitate to call a conclusion in the difficulties being experienced by the post-war efforts at European union.

I have long been a sceptic of the constitution and behaviour of the present European Union and its offspring the eurozone, but of the importance of its co-operative vitality I have no doubt. I have emerged from this survey with an enhanced admiration for my native continent. For all its oppressions, cruelties and ongoing mistakes, I see it as a remarkable corner of the globe, fertile in its culture and in its capacity for leadership and charity. I have learned how easily and often in the past its diplomacy has collapsed into chaos and bloodshed. I have also learned how often attempts to bond it together as one political entity have failed. Finding a balance between unity and diversity remains what it has always been, the defining challenge of European politics. I return to this theme in my epilogue.

Lastly, a note on brevity. This short book is aimed at those without the time or inclination for a longer one. I disagree with syllabuses that maintain history is better taught in depth than breadth. Depth should follow breadth, for without it history is meaningless. Without awareness of the timeline of human activity, individuals become dissociated figures on a bare stage. Those who cannot speak history to each other have nothing meaningful to say. Context–which means a sense of proportion–is everything.

I am with Cicero that ‘to be ignorant of history is to be always a child’, yet history as a series of random events leads to distortion and exploitation, to the weaponizing of exaggerated loyalties and long-held grievances. That is why the art of history is not just of remembering but also of knowing what to forget. It is about giving past time a plot and a narrative. That is the task that a short history should undertake.