European politics is changing, and fast. But the significance of that change is hard to appreciate without a deep understanding of ‘Europe’, meaning its history, politics, culture, and economics. Unfortunately, so much of what we ‘know’ about Europe is based on caricatures and stereotypes. (The same is no doubt true for the rest of the world as well. I blame the demise of area studies, but that is another conversation.) This edited volume — called Europe Today and published by Rowman & Littlefield — can help shed important light.
The book brings together chapters on nine European countries, including Russia and Turkey, with thematic chapters on the many issues those countries have to face and the instruments or institutions they can bring to bear in doing so. At roughly 12k words apiece, the chapters are long enough to give the context within which major developments are taking place. Together with the introduction and conclusion, you should have more than enough material to talk about over a period of up to sixteen weeks.
Our publishers at Rowman and Littlefield have given us permission to reproduce the introduction to the volume here. That introduction is actually a short essay where I argue that Europe is not what most people think it is. Most people think of Europe as old and decadent, imperialist and self-obsessed, irresponsible and yet still privileged. I argue that the reverse is in fact true. Europe is young and dynamic, oppressed and yet self-assertive, responsible and yet disadvantaged. That explains why Europeans have made a virtue out of their necessity to work together, often under powerfully binding self-constraints. There are lessons to be learned from that experience, not just about the difficulty of maintaining peace and prosperity, but also about the power of historical narrative. What follows is the text of that introduction — which is roughly 4k words long, including suggested readings and a list of references
The challenge with introducing Europe Today is to identify the broad themes that can be used to frame the conversation. For much of the world, Europe exists only as a collection of stereotypes. It is old and decadent, imperialist and self-obsessed, irresponsible and yet still privileged. Such stereotypes have an air of truth to them, to be sure. The problem is that they do not shed much light on what we can learn from European experience.
It is undoubtedly true that Europe dominated the globe in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, only to collapse in an orgy of self-destruction once the 20th Century got underway. Both the period of dominance and the period of destruction have left important legacies inside and beyond the European continent. It is also true that in the latter half of the 20th Century, Europe was divided between an ‘East’ dominated by the Soviet Union and a ‘West’ led by the United States. But a tight focus on the ‘Iron Curtain’ covers up the fact that much of Europe retained agency (Rothschild and Wingfield 2000). Individual countries pursued their national interests, often pushing back against the hegemony of the two superpowers. Groups of countries banded together to create new forms of governance in both camps. Those efforts have also had a lasting impact.
Then the Cold War ended, and Europe entered a new phase in its evolution. This new phase did not break away from Europe’s legacy of dominance and destruction, and neither did it escape the influence of European divisions or its experiments with integration. Instead, the new Europe emerged as a synthesis of remembered ‘greatness’ and forced division (Ther 2016). This new Europe also revealed far greater variety of lived experience than most widely held stereotypes would admit. In that sense, there is more to learn from what conventional stereotypes obscure or overlook, than from the obvious truths upon which they are grounded.
Young and Dynamic
Not all parts of Europe are equally ‘old’, for example. Some countries are new or at least newly independent. Just look at the Western Balkans and then across Central and Eastern Europe. The point is not to deny the legitimacy of the boundaries we clearly see on maps; it is to underscore that many of those boundaries are relatively new, or ‘young’, and some are still hotly contested — as are the identities of the people who live within them. Moreover, this contestation is not limited to Eastern Europe. It is real and important in countries like Spain, Ireland, Great Britain, and Belgium. Greece and Cyprus are also affected. So is France when you consider Corsica, Brittany, and perhaps also the Basque region. Italy has important inter-regional tensions as well, not just in terms of North and South, but also at the more local (or granular) level. And many Germans still think in terms of East and West.
Such contestation is tied to the relative ‘age’ of different parts of Europe because it plays out in the political uses of historical memory. Non-Europeans may treat the old-age and decadence of Europe as ‘facts’, but Europeans themselves are constantly revising their history in an effort to redefine who they are, how they should be organized, and who has the right to govern (Clark 2019, Kirchick 2017). The imagination of an historical Celtic nation centred on the Po river valley in Northern Italy has effectively reshaped the politics of that country. Narratives about the dismemberment of the Austria-Hungarian Empire after the First World War are potentially transformative as well. This retelling of European history is a dynamic process capable of unleashing huge amounts of energy, often in the form of violence. The wars that broke out during the collapse of Yugoslavia were hardly an exception; they were and are a cautionary tale (Silber and Little 1997).
The same potential for violence could be seen in Catalonia’s 2017 referendum on independence, in the tensions that have arisen over the impact of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on Northern Ireland, and in the diplomatic standoff between Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey over drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean. This is not a statement of moral equivalence, beyond the blanket rejection of political violence. Rather it is a claim that Europeans can never afford to be complacent about the peace they have accomplished (Jones and Menon 2019). A French-language television station in Belgium once played a spoof broadcast — something like Orson Welles’ radio play about the War of the Worlds — where the northern region of Flanders suddenly broke from the federation; that joke almost caused a panic among the inattentive Walloons who saw it.
The Belgian illustration sounds farcical, and in many ways it was. But it sets one end of the spectrum. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is on the other end. That invasion was preceded by years of denial on the part of Russia’s ruling elite that Ukraine has any right to exist as a country (Herd 2022). Western observers downplayed that rewriting of history as a form of Russian propaganda without realizing that war is part of an extreme (and extremely brutal) form of narrative contestation.
What the Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us is that European ‘decadence’ is an illusion. Peace in Europe was not only hard won, but it is also very difficult to maintain (Jones and Menon 2019). Europeans must be constantly vigilant in guarding against the potential for violent conflict. They must be disciplined in accepting non-violent solutions and in ignoring the opportunities for gain that the use of violence — or, perhaps better, the threat of violence which could start a logic of escalation — might present. Hungary’s reconciliation with the existence of significant Hungarian minorities in Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia was not a foregone conclusion. Neither was Germany’s recognition of its borders with Poland after the fall of communism. Relations in the Western Balkans are still a work in progress, particular within Bosnia and between the Serbian capital in Belgrade and the capital of Kosovo in Pristina.
Of course, nobody in Europe wants violent conflict; such conflict arises because there are many things Europeans want even less. Losing their identity and finding themselves subject to ‘foreign’ authority are high on the list of worse outcomes. More than anything else, that fear of loss explains why the European Union — which won the Nobel Peace prize in 2012 for its role in ‘the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe’ — rests on a principle of unity with diversity.
Oppressed and Self-Assertive
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also reminds us that not all parts of Europe were or are equally ‘imperialist’; many parts of Europe were also subjugated. If European imperialism has left lasting legacies across the globe — and it has — then it is worth thinking about what it has done to so many Europeans. The experience of Poland, which was dismantled and then reassembled from different parts of the European continent is one illustration. The slaughter of ethnic Poles in this process was immense, particularly as undertaken by the Soviet Union (Snyder 2015). When combined with the Holocaust, which massacred millions of Polish Jews, it is easy to understand why contemporary Polish governments might be self-assertive with respect to larger neighbours both East and West.
The legacy of empire does a lot to explain the tensions we see in the United Kingdom and between the Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland (Keating 2021). The Scottish National Party has a very different understanding of the 1706 ‘Treaty of Union’ than either the Labour Party or the Conservatives. In a similar vein, Irish Catholics look for ways to create distance from British influence, whether in the five northern provinces that make up Northern Ireland or in the Republic that the Irish created to assert their independence. This desire not only explains the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants that ran from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. It also the eagerness with which the Republic of Ireland pursued ever deeper participation in the European project and the importance of that project for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland to an end (Murphy 2018).
The experience of empire also sheds light on French politics. Here it is worth distinguishing between two imperial projects — one to transform peasants who spoke Basque, Breton, Flemish, German, Italian, Corsican, or distant dialects of the French language into ‘French’ people through the educational system (Weber 1976), and the other to incorporate Algerian territory on the other side of the Mediterranean into the metropolitan centre of France. These projects explain the dominance of Paris over the rest of the country; they also explain much of the difficulty that France has dealing with immigration and Islam even down to collecting statistics about the ethnicity and religion of the people who live in the country (Laurence and Vaisse 2006). The argument here is too subtle to unpack in a paragraph; the punchline is that you cannot understand French politics without first looking at the legacy of empire within France, particularly as that legacy plays out in the self-assertiveness of groups that feel they have been treated unjustly.
The legacy of empire can be felt everywhere in Europe. The Norwegians still talk about their rough treatment — maybe neglect is a better term — by the Swedes and the Danes. The Finns remember their escape from Russia (and their family connections across the border in Karelia who were unable to leave). The Belgians recall their relatively brief experience as part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and, somewhat more fondly, their close connection to Charles the Great and the Hapsburg Empire. The Austrians remember how their imperial greatness gave way to the ignominy of Anschluss. These stories are woven into narratives about national identity and about the reason why the nation is important. And this is perhaps the greatest expression of how European oppression transformed into self-assertiveness. Because nationalism, as an ideology, emerged out of the rejection of empire (Appiah 2018).
This rejection of empire took positive and negative forms. The positive form came in the historic ambitions for national integration. Germany and Italy are two big illustrations; these countries only exist because of the success of political projects to create them. Those projects had many victims because both countries, much like France, had to create Germans and Italians; both countries also sought to absorb people in other territories. Nevertheless, the projects were successful in convincing the world that Germany and Italy deserve to exist as political entities. The measure of that success can be seen in the huge efforts European and American politicians made at the end of the Cold War to reunify Germany and to prevent Italy from fragmenting (Zelikow and Rice 1997, Anderson 1999).
The more negative form of nationalism is best illustrated by the experience of Central and Eastern Europe. There nationalism centred less on integration than on pushing out groups that do not belong to the national community (Connelly 2020). This is another argument that is too subtle to unpack in a single paragraph. Fair rendering of the argument would also necessarily blunt the distinction between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, because the two places are more similar than different in most respects apart from historical timing. But the punchline is worth delivering without the nuance because it explains why nationalism has – and deserves – such a bad reputation in the 21st Century. The rejection of empire through the promotion of exclusive ‘national’ identities is often xenophobic and racist. This is particularly true when the nationalists can point to a real history of oppression to justify the strength of their self-assertiveness. If there is a common thread that runs through right-wing extremism in Europe, it is that the ‘true people’ of the nation – whomever they may be – are defined in many ways through their victimhood (Rasmussen 2022).
Responsible and Disadvantaged
Somehow, against the odds, Europeans seem to have tamed the worst of nationalist excesses. The wars that broke up Yugoslavia were brutal. Russian violence against Chechens, South Ossetians, Georgians, and Ukrainians suggests that no part of Europe can be considered wholly ‘safe’. Nevertheless, the progress is significant when the peace of the past seventy-five years is compared with the violence that preceded it (Mazouwer 1998).
The nationalism that created Italy and Germany, and that energised metropolitan, imperial powers like Great Britain and France, was enormously destructive – as made obvious by the First and Second World Wars. It is worth asking, therefore, how Europeans have avoided further disaster. The answer lies in the creation of international organisations to encourage self-restraint and to promote the peaceful reconciliation of conflict (Cooper 2004). These arrangements were not obvious; they were innovative. And to the extent to which they ran against the grain of nationalism, they showed just how responsible Europeans can be.
Consider the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That alliance was created at the end of the 1940s to bolster a Brussels Treaty Organization that united a small number of West European countries against the threat that Germany might once again resort to violence. It relied on the continuous involvement of the United States not only to protect against the Soviet Union, but also to sustain the peace between Germany and the rest of Europe. It evolved institutionally in the mid-1950s to promote a gradual and limited German rearmament, even as the United States, France, and Great Britain continued to occupy West Germany. And it implicated the United States in virtually every major decision about European security in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This was not an act of irresponsibility on the part of Europe; it was an acceptance that only a powerful third party like the United States could create the conditions necessary for reconciliation among European countries (DePorte 1986).
When you consider that the United States was founded on a principle of avoiding entangling alliances, European success in promoting and sustaining NATO is nothing short of miraculous (Allin and Jones 2012). And NATO is a success. It was crucial to maintaining security during the Cold War, to supporting Soviet and then Russian withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe, to fostering German unification and widening European integration, to stabilizing the Western Balkans, and to containing Russian violence against its neighbouring countries. That success was not always easy for Europeans. The history of NATO is one of periodic tensions across the Atlantic (Sloan 2018). But Europeans have remained loyal to the alliance and its membership has increased rather than diminished. Even France, which withdrew from the integrated military command structures in 1966, never tried to leave the alliance. Indeed, the French have been some of NATO’s most active participants (and they even re-joined the integrated military command structure in 2009).
The European Union is another illustration. The origins of the EU lie in a coal and steel community to foster Franco-German reconciliation (Willis 1968). Its development extends through the creation of separate communities for atomic energy and economic integration. Ultimately, the economic community proved to be the most important because it created a framework for Europeans to negotiate with one another and with the United States. This economic community absorbed those activities related to coal and steel and atomic energy. It also expanded into areas related to foreign policy, monetary stability, and migration. Along the way, the European Community increased its membership to include both wealthy countries that originally sought to remain outside and poorer countries that desperately needed assistance in their economic development.
The transformation from community to union took place after the end of the Cold War and in the shadow of German unification. This evolution required significant commitment to cooperation across a wide range of policy domains. That commitment was not easy to make. Often it involved compromises that touched deeply on questions of national independence and even identity. As the European Union has continued to broaden the scope of its activities while at the same time expanding its membership, the compromises have become even more challenging. Nevertheless, most Europeans accept that this commitment is necessary if they are to protect and assert their interests in a rapidly changing global environment (Tsoukalis 2005).
Not everyone agreed. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union demonstrates just how difficult and controversial membership can be, even if many would argue that leaving is even more painful (Jones 2018/2019). The point to underscore here is that participation in Europe today is an almost unprecedented act of responsibility. If we stop take stock today, no other countries elsewhere in the world have accepted such a binding institutional arrangement to foster their collective peace and prosperity. Other regional arrangements offer considerable advantages, but none demands so much compromise on the part of its member states.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is a third illustration. This institution was created during the Cold War to help lower the tensions between East and West. The two main sets of issues agreed by the United States and the Soviet Union were diplomatic and economic. The superpowers believed that by sharing information and engaging in cross-border trade and investment, they could build mutual confidence and thereby strengthen security. The Europeans added a third set of issues focused on human rights into the mix, arguing that diplomacy and commerce cannot succeed in fostering a lasting peace without some agreement on the nature of shared values and the importance of protecting them.
Although underappreciated at the time, this commitment to the protection of human rights was a powerful display of European responsibility. By setting the agenda this way, Europeans not only changed how they viewed capitalism and communism, but also how they should promote democracy and international development. The impact was immediately felt in terms of opposition to communism in Central and Eastern Europe (Thomas 2001). And it has had lasting consequences for European engagement since the fall of communism. The OSCE has played a leading role in post-conflict reconciliation and in election monitoring. The results have been far from perfect, either in promoting peaceful reconciliation or in avoiding conflict. But having an organization like the OSCE is far better than the alternative of ignoring shared values and embracing the logic of great power politics.
If Europeans have been responsible, it is because they have made a virtue out of necessity. Put another way, and despite their many privileges, Europeans have had few options but to innovate. The continent they share is too small for them to engage in endless conflict. The resources and markets they have are too limited to compete globally. And the logic of great power politics will always be driven by greater powers outside Europe so long as Europeans cannot unite internally. If Europeans promote shared values, commit to shared decision making, and continue to partner with the United States, that is because they find themselves in a very challenging situation. Moreover, when we look at global politics, demographics, climate change, and the energy transition, those challenges will only increase rather than diminish.
Looking Ahead
Europe Today is hard to introduce because Europe has so many features that most people outside Europe find hard to imagine. Its political institutions are younger than they look, and many are still experimental. Europe’s history is long, but it is contested and prone to manipulation. Therefore, Europeans must fight hard to protect the gains they have made, and they must reconcile voices that complain about the costs of progress and those that suggest progress is somehow inevitable.
The chapters in this volume show the many dimensions of how Europeans continue to struggle – both nationally and on an issue-by-issue basis – in dealing with each other and with the outside world. We should underscore the difficulty involved. Few can look at Europe today and imagine that the situation is easy. Obviously, those countries that have to deal with the legacies of European imperialism are uniquely disadvantaged. Europeans must struggle with their responsibility for that as well, just as they must struggle to help those countries still in the process of economic development find a new road to prosperity that does not rely on doing so much damage to the environment.
The point to underscore is that Europeans can only play that role if they continue to behave responsibly, to defend their core values related to the protection of human rights, the promotion of democracy, and the preservation of civil liberties, and to find new ways to make virtue out of necessity. The question for people looking at Europe Today is whether Europeans will be able to break out of those stereotypes about European decadence and privilege so widely held abroad without descending into conflict. It is also whether Europeans will agree on the importance of playing a constructive role in tackling problems at the global level. And it is about how ready Europeans are to face the prospect that they might lose American support or, what might be even more troubling, that they will need to focus on lending their own efforts to shore up shared values and peaceful reconciliation across the Atlantic.
What we should learn from European experience is just how difficult it is to maintain peace and prosperity. We should also learn that failure is always a possibility and yet should be rejected as an option. People who embrace violence over peaceful reconciliation should look to European history. What they will learn is how quickly global dominance can be lost, and how much greater are the compromises, sacrifices, and efforts that need to be made to protect national cultures as a consequence.
Suggested Readings
Allen, John R., Frederick Ben Hodges, and Julian Lindley-French (2021). Future War and the Defence of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Armour, Ian D. (2021). A History of Eastern Europe, 1918 to the Present: Modernisation, Ideology and Nationality. London: Bloomsbury.
Lemke, Christine, and Helge Welsh (2017). Germany Today: Politics and Policies in a Changing World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Thomas, Daniel C. (2021). The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration.
Van Oudenaren, John (2021). Crisis and Renewal: An Introduction to the European Union. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
References
Allin, Dana H., and Erik Jones (2012). Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity. London: Routledge.
Anderson, Jeffrey (1999). German Unification and the Union of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2018). The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Clark, Christopher (2019). Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Connelly, John (2020). From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cooper, Robert (2004). The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century. London: Grove Press.
DePorte, A.W. (1986). Europe between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance, Second Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Herd, Graeme P. (2022). Understanding Russian Strategic Behavior: Imperial Strategic Culture and Putin’s Operational Code. London: Routledge.
Jones, Erik (2018/2019). ‘Four Things We Should Learn from Brexit.’ Survival 60:6, pp. 35-44.
Jones, Erik, and Anand Menon (2019). ‘Europe: Between Dream and Reality?’ International Affairs 95:1, pp. 161-180.
Keating, Michael (2021). State and Nation in the United Kingdom: The Fractured Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kirchick, James (2017). The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Comin Dark Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Laurence, Jonathan, and Justin Vaisse (2006). Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Mazower, Mark (1998). Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin.
Murphy, Mary C. (2018). Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future: Negotiating Brexit’s Unique Case. London: Agenda Publishing.
Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt (2022). Late Capitalist Fascism. London: Verso.
Rothschild, Joseph, and Nancy M. Wingfield (2000). Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silber, Laura, and Allan Little (1997). Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. New York: Penguin.
Sloan, Stanley R. (2018). Transatlantic Traumas. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Snyder, Timothy (2015). Blood Lands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage.
Ther, Philipp (2016). Europe Since 1989: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thomas, Daniel C. (2001). The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tsoukalis, Loukas (2005). What Kind of Europe? (Updated and Expanded Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weber, Eugen (1976). Peasants in Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Willis, F. Roy (1968). France, Germany, and the New Europe: 1945-1967, Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zelikow, Philip, and Condoleezza Rice (1997). Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Erik Jones 