"European Identity": An Emerging Concept.

by DAVID LOWENTHAL

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 nonEuropean 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 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 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 folk-conscious 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 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 market-driven; 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 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 selfadoration 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 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)

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 memoire,(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 memoire'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 Petain, centralised state to departement, 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 memoire 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. Selfscrutiny 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 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. (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 Stem 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) Frederic Delouche ed., Histoire de l'Europe (Paris: Hachette, 1992). (5) David Lowenthal, "Heritages for Europe", International Journal of Cultural Property, 4 (1992), pp. 377-81. (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. (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. (12) Mark Pluciennik, "Archaeology, archaeologists, and `Europe'", Antiquity, 72 (1998), p. 817; Ashworth, "Heritage, identity and interpreting a European sense of place", p. i 19. (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. (17) Pierre Nora, Lieux de memoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92). (18) Gerd Krumeich, "Le `Grand Nora'", pp. 51-54; Gilles Pecout, "Le regard de l'historiographie italienne", pp. 54-57, both in Magazine litteraire, 307 (February 1993). I discuss Lieux de memoire in "Distorted mirrors", History Today, 44, 2 (February 1994), pp. 8-11. (19) Adam Gopnik, "Elvis of the Elysee", 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". DAVID LOWENTHAL Geography, University College London

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: "European Identity": An Emerging Concept. Contributors: David Lowenthal - author. Journal Title: The Australian Journal of Politics and History. Volume: 46. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 314. COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Queensland Press; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group