Europe is striving to find a common grand narrative which would strike the same chords in the minds of every citizen. It resorts to the past sixty years to fulfil its own wavering belief in the possibility that such a narrative may exist one day. It turns a biased eye on the past to nourish its consciousness of the present. It would like to see in the past the neat, linear and harmonious story of its own birth as if imperial wars and national constructions had been the price to pay for its supposed current state of peace and union. However, Krysztof Pomian reminds us that where historians can trace the evolution of Europe, politicians have to make a choice.[i] “What of the European past is worth preserving?”[ii] This question discards the desperate attempt to ascribe a definite and recognizable identity to Europe to bring up the problem of mutual understanding between plural memories. The problem is not to confront competing national storyboards but to criss-cross various perceptions of a past which took place in a shared space. In this sense, it is meaningless to speak of a European continent or Union without looking at the historical and cultural formation of an object which could be named in such a way.
It seems arbitrary and misleading to try and establish an inventory of distinctive features of Europe, such as specific religious monuments or iconographies, particular medieval remains, or a unique way of organising time. Such an attempt “concentrates on what is dominant, obvious and present almost everywhere on European territory”.[iii] It relies on statistical criteria and shuns the long-lasting presence of minorities. For Pomian, moreover, the main problem of this method would be to discard the dynamic process which has led to present-day Europe and its particularities. Hence, a historical exploration of European space appears necessary and useful. Pomian locates the beginning of this process “somewhere around the middle of the first millennium before Christ”[iv], when the Greeks colonised the Mediterranean and Black Sea shores and came into contact with the Celtics, spread out along the Danube and the Rhine, in current France, northern Italy and northern Spain. Celtic societies were progressively transformed by this new relationship, and, in turn, populations living to their north and east, which Pomian calls “Barbarians without any pejorative sense”, slowly started to move south.[v] Under the influence of Great Greece, the Romans came to prominence, and over the course of several centuries, they eventually dominated their Etruscan and Greek neighbours, before conquering the Mediterranean. The tripartite division between Barbarians to the north, Celts in the centre, and Greeks and Romans to the south became a binary division after five centuries between the Roman Empire to the south and the Barbarians to the north. The latter persisted in the form of Roman and Germanic linguistic families, while the cultural divide between the Latin and Greek inside the Roman Empire developed into two distinct military and administrative regions centralised in Rome and Constantinople. With the rise of Christianity- official religion of the Empire since the fourth century- these capitals became religious as well as political, with the seats of the Pope and the Patriarch based in both cities. The distance between them widened in the fifth century until the Papacy became the main authority remaining from the imperial past, when the Empire had definitively disappeared after multiple invasions. The two temporal and spiritual powers became more and more independent as their languages, cultures, and dogmas diverged. “Since the eleventh century, Catholics and Orthodox Christians considered one another reciprocally as schismatics, the latter’s hostility towards the former aggravated by the infamous Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the thirteenth century.”[vi]
Two spheres of influences differed both in religious practice- in regard to iconography in particular- and cultural matters: the Orthodox area cultivated vernacular languages and a familiarity with Greek texts while the Western view of Greek civilisation was filtered by Latin culture. All this must not obliterate the invasion of Christian lands by Mongols who preserved a three century long hegemony on the territory east of the Dnieper. This had the effect of isolating the region around Moscow even when it became autonomous. Up until the 17th century, the northern part of Orthodoxy was completely remote from Latin Christendom. In the same way, the fall of Constantinople led to the isolation of the region from the West until the 19th century. In parallel, Latin Christendom attained a very high level of religious and cultural unification based on the homogeneous organisation of the Church and the unity of artistic models. Up to the 14th century, the rise of sovereign kingdoms engendered a situation which constantly confronted sovereign states to papacy. Thanks to its confluence with the invention of printing, the Reformation propagated throughout this space and launched three centuries of religious wars between Catholic counter-reformists and Protestants. For Krzystof Pomian, the key moment that explains the birth of Europe is what he calls emergence of a République des Lettres or Republic of Learning. The Enlightenment enabled the creation of a community defined by a common culture, as opposed to a common faith, which could discuss ways of ending wars and replace demonstrations of force by a balance of power. It became a framework transcending individuals and nations to the extent that a community of people shared the same knowledge of classical culture and visual arts. For Pomian, the development of this spirit was complementary to the process of secularisation at work in sovereign states.
From a cultural unification based on Christianity, Europe moved on to a unity based on a common respect for reason and law. This trend nonetheless also implied the industrial revolution, the change of social hierarchies, a revolution in the relation between the city and the countryside. As soon as mass politics had definitely changed the global landscape of society, culture became national and no longer universal. If this movement led to the a climate of permanent friction between nation-states for the gain of land and to the rise of colonial ambitions, according to Pomian, the incredible wave of disasters which tore apart the continent did not completely disintegrate the second cultural unification of Europe. In the same movement of technological modernisation and sophistication, Europeans fostered the massive wars and new means of communication: railways, roads, spreading literacy, radio...
Despite the wide-sweeping and peremptory account of European history that Pomian and this article reflect, one can see that referring to an identity is pure nonsense when it comes to describing a diverse and dynamic entity. “Outside the field of mathematics and logic, however, we never meet identities, only greater or lesser similarities.”[vii] Why has such a word entered common language? Possibly as the symptom of a desperate search for stability and for connections with some sort of heritage. If one were to enumerate like Pomian does at the beginning of his article the multiple characteristics that distinguish Europe from its neighbours, one could define a European identity only in descriptive terms. No one could deduce from the historical particularities of Europe a political definition of European identity. This problem lies on the necessity of basing our relation to the future on our agency of the past. The question is hence that of defining a European identity in its prescriptive sense. However, it may be precisely because in public debates descriptive and perspective definitions of Europe are unduly assimilated that one has no sense of what Europe means. People cannot define what they have not yet chosen to act upon. We destroy only what we replace, as used to say Danton. What will we destroy that we can replace?
Pierre Testard