Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 46, Number 3, 2000, pp. 314-321.
“European Identity”: An Emerging Concept
DAVID LOWENTHAL
Geography, University College London
The idea of European identity has grown in significance and specificity over two millennia.
Earlier, the advance was largely generated by opposition to outsiders, in terms of culture and
religion. Those who thought in European terms were long a tiny minority of rulers, clerics,
financiers, men of learning and the arts. Only in the late eighteenth century did bourgeois
participation broaden consciousness of European community, linked in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to social and political progress. In the past half century European identity
has gained official sanction as a diplomatic and legislative set of entities. Efforts to underpin
existing and to spur new mutuality at the folk-level lag, owing to a host of persisting problems
— linguistic diversity, disparities of resources, unforgotten grievances, doubts about the scope
of territorial expansion, and a felt imbalance between administrative goals and popular
allegiances.
Europe has always been more of a mental construct than a geographical or social
entity. The very notion of Europe was born out of, and long limited to, the realm of
myth and folklore. There is nothing obviously distinctive about this western
appendage to the Eurasian landmass. Europe’s dubious geographical antecedents
begin with Homer’s Hymn to Apollo, in which “Europe” — the Greek heartland —
is set against the non-European world beyond, that is, in the Peloponnesus and the
Aegean islands. The goddess Europa, a symbol of future hope, was also a reminder
of ever-present danger, at risk of rape, captivity, and exile.
Europe has not always been as confined as Homer (or Hesiod) made it, though it
has never been larger than a mere peninsula of Asia. Yet from remote times Europe
was always more important than size alone warranted, thriving and populous by
contrast with the sparseness of lands from which it was sundered by sea or by
desert. From early in the Christian era, Europe’s inhabitants were said to share a
common history and to be conscious of being unlike peoples beyond its eastern and
southern margins.
Yet what was felt to be distinctive about Europe — militant Christianity,
aggressive mercantile expansion, exploration and imperial conquest spurred by
urban growth, technology, and nascent capitalism — soon transcended the confines
of any localised geography. Europe came to be defined by its myriad linkages with
the world beyond. Trade, migration, the spread of languages, and the extension of
empires ceaselessly involved Europeans with the outside world. European culture
and institutions, economy and architecture, are now almost wholly global: Europe
is better understood as stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok than in terms of
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“European Identity”
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any narrowly confined heartland such as might be found within a day’s journey
from Brussels.1
But if the global identity of Europe is an undeniable truth, such a concept of
Europeanness is so all-inclusive as to be unusable. It likewise encourages
obnoxious reminders of imperial conquest and extirpation of non-Europeans and
their cultures. Such reminders not only embitter outsiders; they deflect denizens of
the European heartland from the task of overcoming age-old rivalries and forging a
popular base for their emerging economic and administrative union.
“Europe” — An Unrealised Ideal
Over the past millennium and more, the rise of European civilisation has
engendered a small cadre of aristocratic, bourgeois, artistic, and scholarly elites
who feel increasingly at home throughout the continent and its colonial
appendages. But broader acceptance of Europe as a realm sharing a common
history and destiny has been largely aborted by ingrained prejudices. These biases,
local, national, and global, have prevented most Europeans from viewing
themselves collectively, or accepting a general European perspective on any topic.
Lord Acton, in launching his Cambridge Modern History in 1898, exhorted
Britons to interpret European history with a lofty impartiality that would carry
credence with all Europeans: their account of “Waterloo must be one that satisfies
French and English, Germans and Dutch alike”.2 Acton’s laudable aim stemmed
from Diderot’s deification of detachment: only an “historian raised above all
human concerns” could make sense of the protean past.3 The effort was stillborn,
partly because no such historian ever existed, partly because few of Acton’s
historical colleagues shared his goal.
A century after Acton came a second academic bid for European mutuality: a
history of the continent by scholars from a dozen different nations, published in
most major European languages, except English.4 The English derided the effort as
propaganda, unworthy of English historians who, as was well known, wrote only
unbiased, impartial history. (Though one of the collective history’s authors was in
fact British, he was merely an educator rather than an historian.)
Post-war endeavours to promote European community point up persisting
divisiveness. A 1994 Council of Europe gathering that junketed from Vienna to
Bratislava and Budapest sought a common basis for European heritage. Conferees
laboured long and hard to find some epoch Europeans could safely celebrate
together. They had to go all the way back to prehistory for a mutuality that
1
Gregory Ashworth, “Heritage, identity and interpreting a European sense of place”, in David Uzzell
and Roy Ballantyne eds, Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation:
Problems and Prospects (London: Stationery Office, 1998), pp. 119-20.
2
Acton letter to contributors, in Fritz Stern ed., The Varities of History from Voltaire to the Present
(New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 49.
3
See my “Towards historical literacy”, in History and Its Interpretations (Strasbourg: Council of
Europe Publishing, 1997), pp. 44-52.
4
Frédéric Delouche ed., Histoire de l’Europe (Paris: Hachette, 1992).
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David Lowenthal
transcended national and ethnic enmities. Ultimately they agreed on the Bronze
Age, when Europeans (Basques excepted) might take pride in a common, vaguely
Celtic culture. But Baltic and East European spokesmen continued to deny any
common ground with Russian heritage or history.5
Common concern with the “European” legacy is regularly scuttled by warring
Europeans. Despite solemn exhortations to respect the heritage of others,
destroying and pillaging heritage is integral to national chauvinism, ethnic
cleansing, and minority subjugation. Laments at the loss of Sarajevo’s library and
Mostar’s ancient bridge miss the crucial point: enemies expressly aim to expunge
that opponents’ history in favour of their own. Indeed, devastation is often carried
out in the name of military support by supposed allies; NATO bombs may have
erased more of Kosovo’s heritage than did Serbian iconoclasts.
“Europe” — An Historical Sketch
Ideas of Europe were long confined to small elites — rulers, religious leaders,
intelligentsias of science, law and the arts. Over the past two thousand years, and
especially since the Renaissance, three features of European life became
particularly distinctive: the pervasive pressure of Christianity, both in faith and
ritual and in church buildings and lands; the rise of a dynamic mercantile economy
that promoted trade and urbanism; and the growth of pan-European artistic
expression in architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music.
Only in the late eighteenth century, however, did consciousness of being
European begin to extend beyond these realms of life and to a wider community of
participants. Ironically, the nationalist impetus generated by the philosophy of
Herder and the conquests of Napoleon stimulated a transnational awareness as
well. Celebrants of the national uniqueness of folk life, languages, and vernacular
cultures in Germany, Scandinavia, and Slavonic lands soon found that they also
had much in common with one another. And by the mid-nineteenth century folkconscious heritage encouraged democratisation throughout the Continent, as well
as in American lands settled by Europeans.
“Europe” had by then begun to symbolise ideals of progress and freedom against
autocratic rule and social backwardness. Much of the impulse for European reform
was couched in terms of opposition to repressive Hapsburg and Papal, Ottoman
and Russian regimes. What it meant to be European had radically altered since
Burke’s famous indictment of the execution of Marie Antoinette as marking the
end of the age of chivalry: the age “of economists has succeeded and the glory of
Europe is extinguished forever”.
Not quite the same glory, but a similar sentiment of European superiority led
Tennyson half a century later to declaim in Locksley Hall, “Better fifty years of
Europe than a cycle of Cathay”. A conviction of racial and cultural preeminence
validated European imperial sway over lesser breeds. Hence the British in India
5
David Lowenthal, “Heritages for Europe”, International Journal of Cultural Property, 4 (1992), pp.
377-81.
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termed themselves the Crown’s “European British subjects”, as differentiated from
“natives of India”.6
As the century wore on, European political cohesion became a mystic trope
among the Continent’s statesmen, however combative their nations continued to
be. “We are part of the community of Europe”, Britain’s Prime Minister Gladstone
put it in the 1880s, “and we must do our duty as such”. Such sentiment peaked with
the onset of the First World War (note that “World” equated with Europe); “the
lamps are going out all over Europe”, Lord Grey of Falloden intoned in 1914, and
“we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”.
These fears for the survival of Europe were personified in the stage directions
for Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1908), anticipating that conflagration:
The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping
like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chain like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain
forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a
grey green garment hemmed by the Urals and the Arctic Ocean. The point of view then sinks
downwards, draws near the surface of the perturbed countries … the peoples, distressed by events
which they did not cause, are seen writhing, heaving, crawling …7
Out of this tragic war emerged the League of Nations, whose nascent European
unity was doomed by American aloofness. The interwar decades merely intensified
European rivalries.
Only in the wake of the Second World War have there been serious efforts to
replace suicidal national rivalries with a supranational European entity, and only
since the end of the Cold War has a European-wide structure seemed plausibly
achievable. Elected leaders of Europe’s major states have become active European
advocates, pushing continent-wide economic policies and cultural programs with
some success. Economic integration is so far advanced as to transform national into
European Community politics. Tax harmonisation and pan-European economic
measures have made enormous strides. Le Monde perhaps only prematurely
rejoiced, just before the Kosovo disaster, that the “sinister comedy of centuries-old
hatred is finally finished”.8 The media diffusion of everyday popular culture now
promotes the sense of being European among ever-larger segments of society.
Although a truly pan-European society is still in its infancy, many of its essential
elements are already in place. Most European states are democratic in form and
increasingly democratic in reality; their economies are for the most part marketdriven; their popular culture grows more homogeneous as communications among
them expand.9
Yet in many respects Europeanisation remains superficial, commonality little
evident in everyday life, truly collaborative ventures few and feeble. “Despite all
6
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, “What’s in a name? The politics of defining nationality in Asia”,
International Herald Tribune, 18 February 1999.
7
Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts (London: Macmillan, 1908).
8
Bernard Poirot-Delpech, quoted in Flora Lewis, “Good riddance to archaic frontiers in Europe”,
International Herald Tribune, 5 March 1999.
9
Stanley Waterman, “Cultural Politics and European Jewry”, International Jewish Policy Research 1
(February 1999), p. 23.
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David Lowenthal
the talk of an integrating Europe driven to get together by its single currency”,
writes a financial analyst, “very few deals so far involve cross-border transactions.
Instead, many seem intended to keep foreigners — especially other Europeans —
at bay. Indeed, many are explicitly promoted on nationalistic grounds, ... viewing
banks or industrial corporations as national treasures”.10 And in the realm of
culture, Europe is still rudimentary.
Modern Impediments to European Identity
Why is it that European identity remains so embryonic? It is easy to identify at
least half a dozen circumstances that impede integration.
1. Linguistic diversity. That Europeans speak scores of different languages gives
rise to vexing and expensive problems of communication. Translation costs in
agencies of the European Commission and the Council of Europe are almost
prohibitive. Budget allocations for interpretation far exceed those of the United
Nations, despite the latter’s wider remit, because Europeans cling with jealous
intensity to the prerogatives of national tongues.11 Multilingual education,
spearheaded by the smaller states for whom language skills have long been
essential, makes slow progress. But still more languages will have to be catered for
as Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Estonian, and Slovenian augment existing translation
burdens.
2. Disparities of size and resources. The larger states — notably Germany and
France — are so much more populous and economically dynamic than many of the
smaller entities as to create a threatening imbalance, not only of resources but of
power. The French think of Europe as France writ large, the Germans and
Austrians of it as Greater Germany. To achieve a Europe in which the prospects
and perspectives of Portuguese and Irish, Greeks and Poles, are not utterly
dissimilar from those of French and Germans is a daunting task. It has thus far
brought some marginal states — notably Ireland — unexampled affluence. But to
sustain equity over the long haul will be ever more costly, especially as more
impoverished eastern Europeans join the amalgam.
3. Enduring cultural discords. Pan-European politesse has scarcely subdued
differences of policy and philosophy that make each European people cherish
traditional uniqueness. Grounded in jealous rivalries of long standing, stereotypes
continue to feed on self-adoration and revulsion against others. Besides language
differences, ancient conflicts and grievances and idiosyncrasies of thought and
behaviour remain sources of deep discord.
4. Europeanness suspect as negative. What’s most quintessentially European,
critics suggest, may perhaps not be those traits in which Europeans take pride, but
rather attributes generally felt deplorable, even shameful. Europeans like to conjure
up a shared heritage of democratic progress, mercantile entrepreneurship, Christian
10
Edmund L. Andrews, “European merger mania stays at home”, International Herald Tribune, 26
March 1999.
11
Marlise Simons, “EU’s Tower of Babel”, International Herald Tribune, 27 February 1999.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishers 2000.
“European Identity”
319
and humanist traditions, devotion to art and learning. But the authentic European
spirit equally involves a shared complicity in fascism, racism, colonialism, and
genocide, not to mention the less savory aspects of industrial proletarianisation and
other modern ills.12
No wonder the strongest sentiment shared by many Europeans is fear of some
fancied external threat. American hegemony has spurred European commonality.
Surveys just after the Treaty of Maastricht showed pro-European feeling most
eloquently expressed in opposition to American influence, exemplified now in
McDonald’s, now in Disney, now in the State Department.13 More ominous is the
rising sentiment that sets newly united Europe against Asians and Africans seeking
a better life. The disappearance of barriers within the European Union erects them
more implacably against immigrants, legal or clandestine, from beyond. “Those not
of ‘our continent’ are not our race, our people” — hence they are excluded.14
5. Top-down traditional approaches. Administrative integration within Europe has
far outpaced casual, informal, day-to-day interconnections. And the only prominent
populist links are in such realms as sports and the popular media, engendering
attachments too trivial and ephemeral to serve as adequate foundations for an
organic sense of community. Public resentment against top-heavy bureaucracies
further impedes efforts to build a truly popular Europe. When even Chirac and
Kohl complain, as they did in June 1998 to the European Commission, of an
“excess of centralisation” and of “remote[ness] from citizens and their everyday
concerns”,15 the federal superstate has its work cut out to survive, let alone win
popular backing.
Heritage Contributions to European Identity
Much that Europeans feel able and willing to share is what is commonly defined as
heritage, including the modern concept of that term itself. The sense of an historic
past embraced within the present — a past conserved, used, and exhibited on
behalf of our collective selves — is quintessentially European. More than any
others, Europeans have developed a living symbiosis with the monuments and
artifacts of their built environment and with the written records of their history. For
the most part, to be sure, this history still celebrates achievements and attests
agonies that are local and national. But more and more elements of this history,
however fraught with contention, are seen to transcend national boundaries. Since
European Conservation Year in 1970 and European Architectural Heritage Year in
1975, the sense of the shared patrimony has become institutionalised in countless
private as well as public acts and agencies.16
12
Mark Pluciennik, “Archaeology, archaeologists, and ‘Europe’”, Antiquity, 72 (1998), p. 817;
Ashworth, “Heritage, identity and interpreting a European sense of place”, p. 119.
13
Pluciennik, “Archaeology, archaeologists, and ‘Europe’”, p. 819.
14
Matthew Parris, “Cold wind of change”, The Times, 10 April 1999.
15
Barry James, “What superstate? EU officials ask”, International Herald Tribune, 17 June 1998.
16
Ashworth, “Heritage, identity and interpreting a European sense of place”, pp. 121 and 127.
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David Lowenthal
Heritage in this sense comprises not only material artifacts and monuments of
art but also legacies of ideas in archives and books, among them an essentially
European construct of the idea of history. This heritage is a seamless web of human
memory embracing everything from oral tradition and written records to folkways,
art, architecture, and archaeology. Such modes of valuing heritage have in recent
decades become global but were first and most fully developed in Europe. The
institutions, skills, expertise, and ideology of heritage conservation and display
originated and have borne their main fruit among Europeans.
The best exemplar of this totality is Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire,17 which
conjoins the role of archives and school texts with the celebration of tangible
memorials and monuments in the formation of French national identity. In Lieux de
mémoire’s seven large and lavish volumes more than a hundred scholars explore
French history, memory, and heritage in material and symbolic locales of national,
local, ethnic, and other identities. These range from Versailles to Vichy, Lascaux to
the Eiffel Tower, gastronomy and viticulture to Vidal de la Blache, Bruno’s Tour
de France par deux enfants, to the cyclists’ Tour de France, Charlemagne and
Descartes to Proust and Pétain, centralised state to département, Jeanne d’Arc to
the Gallic cock. They counterpoise Chauvin and Verdun to Breton and Occitan
separatisms, interleave the national archives with the Louvre and the French
language.
Though uniquely French in its structure and rhetoric, Lieux de mémoire is also
prototypically European in its merging of memory and history, text and tradition,
sayings and sites. Yet it remains a venture other Europeans have been reluctant to
embrace. History lends French memorial symbols a resonance lacking in Britain,
whose “places of memory” look back mainly to monarchs and men of letters,
gardens and games. Self-scrutiny appeals little to Germans deprived of prideful
national continuity, or to Italians who have learned to be cynical about their
Risorgimento and whose historiographical legacies are hostile to Halbwachsian
concepts of collective memory.18 Overweening French pride in their own history
— epitomised, during the years of Nora’s collective enterprise, in Mitterrand’s
presidency — was a further obstacle to emulation. Yet it is not unimaginable that
the Mitterrandian sense of history — the high, romantic, even tragic sense — can,
in time, make French history the history of Europe.19
As “the pilot of the vessel of humanity”, Michelet promised in 1831, France
would remake the world in its image.20 The mission civilisatrice echoes yet; “To be
ambitious for France”, President Chirac recently declared, “is to be ambitious for
Europe”.21 French awareness of being an old country, whose viewpoints and values
17
Pierre Nora, Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92).
Gerd Krumeich, “Le ‘Grand Nora’”, pp. 51-54; Gilles Pécout, “Le regard de l’historiographie
italienne”, pp. 54-57, both in Magazine littéraire, 307 (February 1993). I discuss Lieux de mémoire in
“Distorted mirrors”, History Today, 44, 2 (February 1994), pp. 8-11.
19
Adam Gopnik, “Elvis of the Elysée”, New Yorker, 3 June 1996, pp. 40-45.
20
Michelet quoted in Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994), p. 138.
21
Chirac quoted in Lewis, “Good riddance to archaic frontiers”.
18
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are alike the envy and the annoyance of the rest of the world, is what most of
Europe now increasingly shares.
A nation, it is said, is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a
common hatred of its neighbours. Europeans have traditionally vied for priority in
mutual antagonism. The only countries that used to summon up the name of
Europe, as Bismarck is reputed to have remarked, were those too weak or timorous
to use their own. However cynical national rhetoric continues to be, that is now far
from being the case. It is the strongest and largest states — France, Germany —
that most confidently evoke the name European. The Euro may be weak, but the
status of Europe is now so enviable that its aspirants, however cautious, embody a
greater range of land and cultures than ever before.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishers 2000.