What is the narrative of the European Union — and why it is high time we revised it
I.
Recently, a collection of free teaching and learning material for schools was published on the website of the Council of the European Union. It includes videos and illustrated stories with cute animals representing the various countries and institutions. In one video intended to introduce primary school children to the concept of the European Union, an animated tree takes the role of the wise old sage and speaks to a bee. The tree says the following:
A long time ago, the animals of the forest were at war. When they gathered in the magic lantern and talked, they promised to each other that they would never be at war again.
This is a succinct expression of what we have all come to accept as the narrative of the EU, and the fact that it is seen as adequate to teach to children shows how basic it is perceived to be. In this narrative, the Union represents a break from a historical tradition of near ceaseless war and bloodshed on the European continent.
Where does this narrative come from? The usual (and apparently self-evident) answer is that the territory comprising the EU has enjoyed an uninterrupted period of widespread peace the duration of which has no precedent since the Pax Romana, and arguably no precedent at all as the Roman times weren’t really that peaceful. This is a view widely shared, enough so that it was the grounds for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU in 2012.
There are good reasons to question all of this. The popular narrative may well be completely accurate — but there is also the possibility that it may be only a giant, collective illusion of our times.
II.
Claims that European history was always warlike draw on a readily available argument: press the pause button on any historical period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the European Union, and you will always find instances of Europeans being at war with each other, sometimes in small peripheral struggles, other times in massive conflicts that protracted themselves for decades and turned entire kingdoms upside down.
If you cannot look at any moment in well over one millennium of European history without finding war, then surely the conclusion is incontrovertible: bloodshed is ingrained in Europe’s own blood.
Very well. What happens, however, if we perform the same exercise of looking at European history as a whole, but instead of looking for instances of war, we look for instances of the opposite? By this, I don’t mean simply looking for periods of ‘absence of war’, but for times in which European nations proactively put aside their differences and looked for arrangements that would avoid and negate war, and not in the endless supply of imaginary utopias or writings by intellectual idealists, but in the real world of politics, law and diplomacy.
I’ll be even more precise: does the European Union itself have any precedent in the history of Europe?
III.
I wish to answer the above question by looking at two very prominent case studies in European history.
The first is the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Though formally established only in 1569, the history of it effectively stretches from 1386 to 1795, and at its largest, it covered almost one million square kilometres (by way of comparison, the largest nation in Europe today — not counting Russia with its endless Asian steppes — is Ukraine, with six hundred thousand square kilometres).
The Commonwealth was born peacefully. A succession crisis in Poland led to the marriage of Polish-Hungarian princess Jadwiga with the Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila (later renamed Jagiello), bringing the two kingdoms together in a union that was at first very brittle, but which deepened greatly in time as the two kingdoms built a shared system of government, common laws and a single currency.
As well as being one of the largest and most successful polities in Europe for centuries, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was an incredibly progressive state for its time. It had a bicameral legislature, strict limits on the powers of the king, appointments of the sovereign by election (although with voting rights restricted to the nobility), respect for multiculturalism, and in general a political culture much more advanced and sophisticated than many historians have been ready to admit. It also involved more than just Poland and Lithuania, bringing together a variety of peoples and kingdoms from a territory that nowadays touches ten different European countries.
The other example I’d like to highlight is the Holy Roman Empire, also a huge polity (1.1 million square kilometres at its largest). Unlike the Commonwealth, its origins are far from peaceful — its history begins with the extensive conquests by warrior kings like Charlemagne and Otto the Great. In spite of its name, however, it would be misleading to characterise the Holy Roman Empire as an imperial system (as Voltaire famously remarked, ‘This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.’).
Instead, for the majority of its incredibly long history (800–1802), the ‘empire’ acted rather as a regulatory and diplomatic body that wherever possible settled dynastic disputes between its internal members by means other than war. This is not to say that it was always successful or always a peaceful polity (particularly in the earliest phases of its history), but several of its functions can be said to overlap with those of the modern EU.
If it is true that you can’t look at European history at any time since the Romans without finding war, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire are proof that the opposite is also true: no matter which historical moment you select, from the Medieval period to roughly 1800 there are precise, large-scale instances of institutional unions intended to hold the peace within its territories.
Moreover, this argument does not rely exclusively on these two unions. Other examples worth mentioning include the Swiss confederation, the Lombard League, the Hanseatic League, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the union of Sweden and Norway, the Iberian Union, and of course the United Kingdom, which exists to this day. If we choose to wind the clock back even more, we find that leagues of city-states were an Ancient Greek tradition that predated even the Roman Empire.
Don’t mistake my argument — I’ m not trying to suggest that all these unions were idyllic, progressive or exemplary. Some were born in war, some were oppressive, and of course none of them makes for an exact parallel to the modern EU.
But the fact remains that the animated tree we quoted earlier was wrong, or at least misleading. The ‘animals of the forest’ weren’t always at war, and the process of ‘gathering together in the magic lantern’ to promise there would not be war has already been performed multiple times. It may well be as inherent, essential and characteristic a feature of European history as war itself.
IV.
We have established that European history had many unions. But what are we to make of them? How meaningful and relevant are they, when trying to assess whether European history was fundamentally warlike or peaceful?
I wish to stress right away that in popular historical discourse, European unions enjoy very little currency. They are seldom discussed and more often forgotten. Certainly they are a lot less famous than our wars. Almost everyone in Great Britain, for example, has at least heard of the 100 Years’ War, the famous medieval conflict between England and France remembered for the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V and Joan of Arc. Only the most historically erudite are aware that from 1714 until 1803 the United Kingdom comprised parts of Germany (specifically the territories then called the Kingdom of Hanover).
One might be tempted to conclude that if people do not remember these unions, perhaps they weren’t that important after all. And yet it is not just in popular perception that unions aren’t given sufficient attention — professional historians have overlooked them as well, a fact that historians themselves have often acknowledged.
A work of research that to this day remains almost unique is Georg Jellinek’s 1882 study of unions, Die Lehre von den Staatenverbindungen. More an essay in jurisprudence than history, Die Lehre systematically examines and classifies systems of administration other than that of the unitary state, listing historical examples of personal unions, dynastic unions, real unions, unions by incorporation, communities of states, unorganized associations of states, confederal unions, federal unions, and colonies.
Jellinek’s study is memorable, among other things, because the author himself highlights how little work has been done on studying unions. The opening sentence of the book reads: ‘In few areas of public law does such a lack of clarity reign supreme as in the study of unions of states.’
The road blazed open by Jellinek was never followed by others, yet his surprise endured. Almost one hundred years later, in 1978, Australian political scientist S. Rufus Davis would lament in The Federal Principle that ‘there is a treatise to be written on the “non-federal system of government”’, a reference to the fact that the only model for academic studies of unions consisted in the governmental system of the United States of America.
Attempts at writing such a treatise have sporadically been made by a handful of historians (Thomas Fröschl, Joachim Bahlcke), but these are rare and recent exceptions. Jellinek’s class today remains as it has been for one hundred and fifty years: almost empty.
V.
Once again, I should clarify my argument: I am not saying, of course, that nobody ever studied the history of any given union like the Holy Roman Empire. All such composite polities have been examined and counter-examined at length. Instead, the point is that unions have almost always been studied from the perspective of the history of a given nation.
This was one of the main arguments, for example, of historian JGA Pocock’s article British History: A Plea for a New Subject, in which the author denounced the anglocentric nature of studies of the United Kingdom. It was followed by a flourish of new studies, but these simply shifted the perspective to that of Wales, Ireland of Scotland, which is not quite the same as a proper investigation into non-unitary states in a broader context and as a topic in its own right.
The inability to think of unions outside the normative framework of the unitary state also accounts for the generally negative light in which these have been portrayed — and this perhaps explains their relative obscurity.
Take the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. As a political giant in European history, and a polity in many ways among the most advanced and successful of its time, it should be very famous. Instead, many Europeans know very little about it, or have never even heard of it at all.
Why is this? At least part of the answer lies in the fact that the intellectuals from the countries that comprised the Commonwealth have taken very little pride in it, seeing it as a ‘contamination’ or a ‘dispersion’ of their unity as a nation. Historians like Simas Sužiedėlis in Lithuania, or Mykhailo Hrushevsky in Ukraine, wrote their seminal accounts from the perspective of national identities that had only recently been formed, and they presented the Commonwealth as an imperial, colonial project that robbed their peoples of their sovereignty.
Ordinary people in Italy know about the Roman Empire because historians in their country have always drawn pride in its achievements and its grandeur. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have never been presented the Commonwealth in quite the same way, and this particular treatment has been reserved for the majority of the many unions that occurred in European history.
VI.
Should any of this surprise us? History is and always has been wrapped up in the ideas of its time. Moreover, history itself is an idea, and it too changes over time.
Our current idea of history is that of an academic discipline with a number of defining qualities, such as objectivity and verifiability. The history of this idea dates back to the 1820s, when a new methodology was championed by professional historians like Leopold Von Ranke, but it did not emerge out of nothing.
Instead, it was one result of a process of deep academic reform that was part of the greater social transformations shaking up Europe in and after the Napoleonic age. These transformations included, among other things, a new form of constitutional law that laid emphasis on the unity of the state and its relationship with the citizens. Alongside the diffusion of republican ideals that defended not aristocracy but the equality of all citizens, this gave rise to the very specific idea of the nation-state — or what we understand today as a ‘country’.
Many of Europe’s contemporary countries, including such heavyweights as Germany and Italy, were born in the century following the Napoleonic invasions (and in no small part as a reaction to them). Even in polities that retained their monarchies, this idea of a specific territory possessed of (alleged) cultural unity ruled not by a person or group of people but by a single abstract entity called the ‘state’ became not just commonplace but highly desirable. An entire mythology of nationalism was developed everywhere in Europe by its poets, writers and artists, even as whole branches of political science devoted themselves to the study (and the legitimisation) of the nation-state as the ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’ or ‘ultimate’ system of government.
The historical discipline was very much involved in this process. The default framework for historical studies became — and to a great extent remains — binary: our most common idea of a history book is either the biography of an individual, or, pointedly, the ‘history of a nation’. Alongside the mountains of histories of France, Spain, etc. we also got a correspondingly broad bibliography on the history of the state, and its origins, its evolution, its different forms, and so on.
On the other hand, we never had anything like these levels of attention devoted to the study of unions, or non-unitary states in general. As exemplified by Sužiedėlis and Hrushevsky, historians saw them with great suspicion. They were at best suboptimal systems of government, at worst perversions of the ‘natural’ idea of the nation they belonged to.
VII.
The ‘horrors of nationalism’ is an expression we are all familiar with. But if the history of Europe is one of perpetual war, then surely these words make no sense. War, imperialism, and mass slaughter existed long before even the idea of our modern countries did, so what ‘horrors’ could we possibly lay at the doorstep of nationalism?
The truth may be more subtle. No less than in earlier history, Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries featured many ‘systems’ that were designed to prevent war — think of the numerous ‘conferences’ and ‘congresses’ held by the powers of the time, of the informal ‘Concert of Europe’, and from 1920 the League of Nations — as well as a sophisticated understanding of international law. But the real problem was the idea of the nation-state itself. This implied that each state was a unitary, indivisible entity involved in a zero-sum game with other similar entities. In international relations, the gain of any given state always involved an equivalent loss for another. The notion that a union of states may benefit everyone involved seemed to run counter to this principle.
The real novelty in the 19th and 20th Century was that competitive relations were normalized. It was accepted, even ‘natural’, that different states should constantly be trying to one-up each other, and never cooperate except when trying to one-up some other third party. In the absence of a supranational organisation with the true power and authority to settle disputes, war became as inevitable as disagreement, culminating of course in the World Wars. The mentality that cornered European peoples into this bleak ‘fight-or-die’ situation on an international scale is perhaps what we should truly refer to when we speak of the horrors of nationalism.
We have seen that in the accepted narrative, the European Union is presented as a break from a long tradition of war and bloodshed. But what if the truth is exactly the other way round? Perhaps the ‘break’ from our traditions came in the age of nationalism (circa 1820s to1940s), when European nations truly embraced a philosophy of total war and refused to even conceive of cooperative relations as such.
If that is true, then the EU represents not a ‘break’ from but instead a return to our true historical roots as Europeans. We have been doing — and thinking and talking and writing about — peace and cooperation for centuries, even millennia. Indeed, we have been doing this practically for the entirety of our history as Europeans — until the age of nationalism.
Is it possible that a drive towards peace and cooperation is as characteristic of our history as Europeans as a drive towards violence and war? Finding instances of either seems easy enough.
VIII.
The question at stake here is as philosophical as it is historical, and I wish to assist myself with a quote very few will be familiar with. In issue #11 of his Gea graphic novels, Italian author Luca Enoch has two characters involved in an exchange about war and humanity. This is what they say:
Soldier: Look at the past century, the 1900s. In only one hundred years, a hundred million people were murdered [in war]. One hundred million! Can you even visualize a number like that? […] What is the picture that emerges from this? That of an earth inhabited by sanguinary people, who have no scruples in taking life!
Rebel: Of course one hundred million dead seems ghastly, yet it is only one percent of the world population that lived throughout that century. Is it very much? Is it very little? It depends on the order of magnitude that we choose, it is a proportional factor. […] Each of those deaths taken individually is an unbearable tragedy. But looking at those one hundred million crimes collectively, in the context of the 12–15 billion people who lived in the 1900s, it seems like a small thing, and for me it offers a reassuring picture of the social life of humanity.
The philosophical problem at stake is portentous here. Can we characterise the human race, or at least human history so far, as on the whole violent and belligerent even if the majority of human beings live(d) their lives without a first-hand experience of war? Or are the wolves of our history so terrible that they overshadow every last one of our lambs? Should we judge humanity the way we do an individual, who remains a murderer for killing one person no matter what else they do, or should we think of ourselves rather like a team, in which the actions of one member do not define the identity of the whole?
The answer to such questions lies beyond the scope of this article, but one thing is certain: pronouncing a moral judgment on something as immense as European history is far from easy or straightforward. Instead it is a challenge that commands us to confront the deepest, hardest philosophical questions — and one that may yield many different answers depending on each person’s perspective. We must not reject but embrace this plurality, accepting that even starkly contradictory interpretations can and must coexist.
The question of whether European history is fundamentally warlike has no single, definitive answer. However, modern history’s bias in favour of the nation-state, and the long work historians have done to bury, ignore or even discredit our long tradition of cooperation and agreement — that is not a matter of opinion. It is verifiable, historiographical fact.
At the root of how we think about the European Union today there is this slanted historiography. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean immediately ditching the narrative of Europeans as a violent, warlike people — as I said at the outset, it may well be entirely accurate. But it may also be entirely inaccurate, and certainly it is not above interpretation, criticism and challenge. This article does not demand that you ditch the established narrative — but it does request that you question it.