Since the European Union parliamentary elections some two weeks ago, Europeans have been putting themselves through a bout of navel gazing and introspection. People are asking what exactly is the purpose of the European Parliament when every country has its own legislatures, both national and local? Why did a record low number of voters turn out? Why did eastern Europeans—only recently liberated from the yolk of dictatorship which denied them the vote—cast fewer ballots than anyone else (with only a couple exceptions)? Why do the British talk as if membership to the European Union is a yoke around their necks?
More broadly, what is Europe?
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 it is divided into several confessions. They all have the same principals of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world.”
In a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn, and William Gladstone—the early advocates of European unity—could only dream, a united Europe has become a reality with half a billion members.
War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil strife across the continent over the centuries pitted the French against Germans, British against French, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews, reaching its dreadful climax in World War II. Of all the continents, over the millennium, Europe has been the most warlike.
Many, if not most, of that generation wondered in 1945 if they’d ever see Europe in any state of grace or glory again—much less unified. As Jan Morris wrote of World War II in her book, Fifty Years of Europe, the “great cities lay in ruin, bridges were broken, roads and railways were in chaos. Conquerors from East and West flew their ensigns above the seats of old authority, and proud populations would do almost anything for a packet of cigarettes or some nylon stockings. Europe was in shock, powerless, discredited and degraded.”
That burying the hatchet to forge common institutions has come so far so fast is the twentieth century’s greatest achievement. Likewise, the creation of the euro, the common currency of the nations in the Eurozone, took Europe another mighty step toward the kind of unity that prohibits war. (Following the Declaration of Independence it took the United States of America nearly 90 years to establish a fully mature common currency whereas Europe traveled the same course in only 40 years.)
This astonishing progression begs the question: what is the glue that holds it all together? After all, geographically Europe is no more than a peninsular protruding from the land mass of Asia. Culturally, Europe has always been a potage of languages, peoples, and traditions.
If one really stops to consider the matter, it is religion—neither politics nor economic interests—that through the ages made Europe one, held it together through its vicissitudes and provided the common morality and identity that makes the European Union possible today.
Of course, one can ask what the contemporary cults of finance, sports, television, pop culture, and eroticism have to do with a Christian heritage. Nevertheless, despite it all, through changing fashions, through wars big and small, the idea of a Europe that persists is essentially Christian. Economic self-interest, on its own, would never have created the European Union and the Eurozone.
Perhaps the poet T. S. Eliot said it best: broadcasting to a defeated Germany, Eliot reminded his audience that, despite the war and “the closing of Europe’s mental frontiers because of an excess of nationalism, it is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will depend on the Christian heritage for its meaning.”
How long this will remain the case is a matter for another essay. Europe, however, is not first and foremost a political concept nor a financial convenience. It is an ideal that will never be complete. And we will work at it all our lives, as will future generations.
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).