How can coherent sense be made out of Europe? Its history takes us from ancient Greece to the (most recent) invasion of Ukraine. Even the continent itself is hard to define. You can walk for 9,000 miles between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, from Cadiz to Vladivostok, without hitting an impassable span of water – so where, when and why does Russia begin or cease to be European? The extent to which Britain and Ireland are politically separate from this landmass is another vexed question; Turkey’s status is problematic too.
And even where boundaries are drawn and observed, there’s no discernible unity of race or religion or nationhood. “European civilisation” has meant radically different things according to time and place. The inheritance of Rome barely penetrated Scandinavia; Christianity has battled it out with Islam throughout southern Europe; Finns, Basques and Hungarians speak languages that bear no relation to anyone else’s. We Europeans are as divided in as many ways as we are united, and will continue to be.
Roderick Beaton is scarcely the first to take up the challenge that this diversity presents. In the past 30 years alone, both JM Roberts and Norman Davies have written up wide-ranging, thousand-page chronicles of Europe; at the other end of the academic spectrum, Simon Jenkins has rattled off a breezy whistle-stop summary, lacking any scholarly apparatus or airs. All have their virtues, but in Europe: A New History, Beaton, emeritus professor of history at King’s College, London, has tried something different.
“There never has been a political state called Europe,” as Beaton says, but there have been many attempts to establish an international confederacy. This model had distant origins in the Achaean League of city-states, which emerged in the Peloponnese during the 2nd century BC. Although Sparta’s overweening ambitions soon caused the League to fissure, it offered a possibility that intrigued Italian scholars during the Renaissance, and subsequently influenced the political philosophy of Montesquieu and the American Founding Fathers, as well as the constitutions of Switzerland and post-war West Germany.
Such a dream also lies at the heart of the European Union, an idea that stretches back immemorially. One seed was planted when, in 1814-15, the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna legislated free-trade measures: a precursor to the European Single Market. In the 1870s, Victor Hugo would rhapsodise that “Europe needs a European nationality, a single government, an immense brotherly arbitration”. Half a century later, the thrillingly exotic Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi – the original, Beaton points out, of Casablanca’s cosmopolitan Victor Laszlo – saw a border-free customs union as the only way to resist the malign encroachments of Russia and the US.