This essay appeared earlier in the bundle Freedom & Responsibility (2022), issued by Socires in cooperation with national committee 4 and 5 May. More information under Socires.en/publications.
Much more than a history of nation states, European history is a story of place and time, of circumstances, sometimes foreseen, but usually unforeseen; a story about the brutal facts of geography and borders, and especially about the fates of people and families against the background of those facts.
Or as Sigmund Freud once said: All history is family history. The proximity of others, and the connection with others, characterizes European life.
Twente is Europe, as Trieste and Tbilisi are. The reality of these European places is a reality of war and peace. Or, perhaps, from European civil wars and the masquerade that always precedes and follows.
According to the British historian Norman Davies, the most recent was also the longest of European civil wars. 1 For seventy-five years, the civil war of the 20th century lasted. From 1914 to 1990 Europe was plagued by this civil war, which only ended when the peace treaty with and over Germany was signed in 1990 by the former occupation powers and the two Germanys of the Cold War, thus ending the issue of Yalta and Germany.
This peace treaty, which was established only forty-five years after the capitulation of Hitler-Germany, laid the foundations for the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany and Europe, facilitated by the process of European integration and inspired by a continent-wide aspiration to peace, which was codified in the Treaty on European Union, signed in Maastricht in December 1991. This Maastricht Order is now being tested by European history: does it really exist?
Cross Sea
Europe's longest civil war began over a hundred years ago, in 1914, with World War I, the Great War. To this day nobody knows exactly why this war has broken out. Despite libraries full of research and historical reconstructions on the subject, we are still in the dark about that crucial question: Why did Europe start the war that ended peace?2 The war of lost innocence.
That war that would be the last of history but instead opened up a new and devilish chapter of European history.
The open future of 1914 turned out to be a "cross sea" to speak to Claudio Magris;3 As the geometric wave pattern of squares, which may arise, two wave streams intersect off the coast, or when the wind is opposite to a wave current, thus creating a dangerous sea from which it is difficult to escape, and on which floating becomes impossible. In 1914 European history became a cross sea.
Looking back at that fatal moment in European history, the French novelist Roger Martin du Gard, during the 1920s and 1930s, wrote his great family ego Les Thibault:4 Hundreds and hundreds of pages of compelling prose, describing the disruptive dynamics of fake news and real bluff, which marked the run-up to the First World War; that craziening rat race of overdoing countries and individuals, who in no time became Europe too violent and too powerful, and caught it, and imprisoned it for decades, in an as unimaginable as macabre reality.
In the last part of his book Martin du Gard describes the summer of 1914, in which literally no one could escape this great transition from peace, freedom and responsibility to war, coercion and religious nationalism.
- This transition, in which all things happen as if the individual living in peace has forgotten something essential about the social condition, namely that he or she is powerless without others, and that wherever others are powerless, he or she is.5
- This transition would transform Europe from before the Great War forever into Die Welt von Gestern, that sweet but lost world, which was so strikingly written by Stefan Zweig,6 and was swallowed by the crucifix of European history, in which the essence of the social condition was dragged into the depths, to the absolute bottom. That history hasn't disappeared. She is the sediment at the bottom of the present.
Advanced
No peace and happiness without the threat of overwhelming and error. That tension never disappears, because time can be healing, but also merciless. Tolerance, freedom, cooperation, human rights and the rule of law, they can just fly between two autumn seasons. No beauty of freedom and liberation, for example, without the tension of the real danger of violation and rape. What's beautiful is fragile.
European history teaches that little can disappear as abruptly as peace, at least as it subsequently seems to be lost.
- Only afterwards comes the realization that the pounding forces on the fragile foundations of peace are far too often swept away.
- Only afterwards comes the insight that happiness is usually only a moment.
- Only afterwards, after the excitement and after the fear of overwhelming, will the warning voices that preceded the disaster be appreciated, as will their hopeless splendor of nuance.
We are constantly pointing out to each other in Europe that we live in a post-war Europe. But that's a long time ago. With the extinction of the generation that has really experienced that afterward, reality changes. After all, an advance in the present is a change of tide, a twist of wind, the announcement, perhaps, of a new cross sea.
Divine comedy
In Europe they have been there for years, the vulnerable voices that proclaim the beauty of insight. But in today's heated atmosphere, they fade, just like the post-war European moments of happiness that they sing and try to cherish.
An example. On 28 October 2005, Tommaso Padoa- Schioppa gave a lecture at the Bocconi University in Milan.7 At that time, this economist, banker and architect of the euro had just resigned from the management of the European Central Bank (ECB). Padoa-Schioppa stood at the threshold of the Ministry of Finance in the olive-tree government of Romano Prodi, a novel in Italy of that time and an impeccable move in the fight against the unstoppable advance of Berlusconi, who had already been Prime Minister in 1994.
In his Bocconi speech, Padoa-Schioppa noted something important: the Europe of integration had invented peace, as he said, but it failed to turn that invention into reality. Somewhere past half of his speech Padoa-Schioppa quoted Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto 26) to outline the mood he had been observing for a long time: And we were glad, but that soon turned into tears and fear of death.
We were delighted by the incredible victory over the European Civil War. I also welcome the unprecedented success of the peace process in Western Europe. However, that happy invention was nowhere really laid down, unless it was in the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). But if that was the case, then one thing was clear: the work was not finished. Maintenance was urgent. Yet the smart young people with whom Padoa-Schioppa worked at the ECB behaved as if Europe were finished, he said.
And so Padoa-Schioppa was the alarm clock: The EU is not a peace, it is just a truce. .
The Maastricht Order is nothing more than an imperfect intermediate position, which must be maintained but, above all, brought forward if it is not to be crushed by history. To win peace requires daily maintenance and continuous change: ideas instead of ideas, holding small steps instead of simple big words, teaching freedom and responsibility instead of lazy consumerism.
The words in which Padoa-Schioppa packed his message were beautiful and erudite, but oh so fragile. Their sound didn't carry far. At the end of his speech only the brilliance of the prosecco remained in perfectly polished flûtes. It was only 2005, the real crises had yet to come. South Ossetia was still part of Georgia and Crimea was still part of Ukraine, Belarus was still the last dictatorship of Europe. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression was still hidden in the mists of the future. Brexit didn't exist yet. Erdogan Turkey had yet to open accession negotiations with the EU.
At that time, European history may have felt farther away than ever. Times had changed, at least as it seemed, especially in the dominant West of Europe, Europeans still believed to be in the 20th century "American Europe."
The banlieu of Paris
Archive research shows that there was a place and time when this American Europe was indeed more real than any other Europe. We are talking about Western Europe in the crucial first decades after World War II.
From Jean Monnet, the godfather of European integration to Isaiah Berlin, the leading Cold War intellectual of the post-war West, the carriers of post-war Western Europe were sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the icon of the American example.8 And from the European trade unions and employers' organizations to religious networks, almost all leading and influential Europeans soon became closely involved in the unstoppable rise of the American Europe after the Second World War.
That American Europe hadn't just happened since 1945. In political terms, the beginning of the American century was marked by the active involvement of the United States in the peace negotiations after the First World War, in 1919 in Versailles; These peace negotiations which were later called America's geopolitical coming-out party.
This included a new generation of young Americans who grew up after the First World War, especially in Paris. From that forming experience on the other side of the Atlantic, these young Americans were passionate about what they themselves described as their love affair with Europe.9 They had fallen like a block to the dangerous Europe of the interbellum, so marked and traumatized from the Great War: insecure and impoverished, feverish and out of control, a goddess of despair and expressionism.
The young Americans of that time, mostly coming from mediated environments on the East Coast, would become the builders of the . They represented a new America: no longer turned inward, but directed outward. A great power full of self-confidence that matched an ever-growing dominant position, an ever-growing economy of commerce and abundance, and an ever more favourable exchange rate for the dollar.
Nowhere could this new American self-confidence be more polite and exploited than in the city of love, in the nightclubs of Paris, where Jazz and Josephine Baker created a strange, exotic, kind of home feeling. A sense of home that was found all over Europe, in a watered and kitschy imitation, but nevertheless; from Zagreb to Bonn and from Liège to Enschede. The European temptation was everywhere. Western Europe was like Paris. But Paris remained Paris: There was all that lustful excitement though than real.
And the city was theirs, the Americans with money and ideas and greed... Poetry in motion, the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, feminine and seductive in a European way. The Paris where the new American elites of intellectuals, businessmen and bankers found each other in a common crush on that superior female city with the most famous phallus symbol in the world. The young Americans in love of the 1920s had described Europe as the "Banlieu of Paris."10
From the 1940s on, their crush would continue to work in an unprecedented way in American foreign policy. It was not by chance Hemingway himself who arrived in 1944 racing in a jeep to disable the Ritz hotel in Paris from the Nazis.
Institutions of escapism
And yes, Europe wanted to receive them. They were wonderful lovers, those virile Americans with their unspoiled lust for life. The rape of Europe has never been sweeter than it was then, in Western Europe after the wars of the twentieth century when the love of the 1920s gave way to the act. The post-war Western Europe became the Europe of the community.
The abduction of Europe during the pax Americana was like a dream. The American-loved part of Europe became the healthiest and happiest area in the world. And the experiment of the Western and European community proved to be a success.
Within the western multilateralism that began in the 1940s, ideas for a new order of cooperation were tried and developed through continuous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To a certain extent, institutions and systems such as Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the International Trade Organisation (later GATT and WTO), the Marshall Plan, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEES), the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), its predecessor, the European Payment Union (EBU), and the European Economic Community (EEC) or common market, were all part of the same pan-western pursuit of prosperity and stability through a resilient combination of capitalism and democracy in Western Europe.11 All this was linked to, often truly transnational, networks and lobbyists, such as the Action Committee for the United States of Europe by Jean Monnet, the World Council of Churches, the Bilderberg Conferences, etc.
All this has also been translated into the national realities of the Member States of European integration, welfare states building to combat poverty and emancipation of mass displaced persons. In the Netherlands, for example, it was through new institutions such as the Social Economic Council (SER), the Labour Foundation, and industrialization policy and social policy supported by ideals and practices of upliftment, whether or not rooted in the goal of the breakthrough.12
But the American relationship with Europe ended up being a love affair. No matter how long that whim would last, it would eventually remain: a whim, a temporary psychosomatic disorder of the most powerful country of the twentieth century. In addition: The object of American love was so dangerously non-American, so excitingly hypocritical, so otherwise erotic, so deep as to be old and amoral. That couldn't last.
In short, a time would inevitably come when the good guys would be good guys again in their own country, not between the European sheets of foreign women, but love would be recreated on the fresh green, green grass or home.
And then Europe would remain the shadow again, just the shadow; the shadow of shame and silence of silence and silence. Sensitive Europeans quickly feared that moment.
The 25th hour
The Dutchman Max Kohnstamm played a pivotal role in the Europe of early European integration, as a faithful right-hand man of Jean Monnet, the first chairman of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, but also as one of the prominent Dutch prisoners of the Nazis, but still travelled shortly after the war in a delegation of churches that had moved to the devastated Germany, seeking reconciliation, an act of European responsibility which would not be forgotten in the Federal Republic.
Kohnstamm was drawn by the horrors of the war he had in camp Amersfoort served and later in "Hitlers Herrengefängnis" in Sint Michielsgestel13 But it wasn't broken. In the project of European integration he saw a unique opportunity to connect social order and individual freedom. For Kohnstamm Europe was the new meaning, but he was not at all reassured. The panic could hit him if the integration process was in crisis. Then the repressed memories from the haunted house of 1940-45 crawled into his mind.
This also happened one morning in April 1961, on a plane over the Atlantic. What happened?
On his way to the airport in Paris Kohnstamm had broken with what he called his "society" regime. For years he had followed it with an iron discipline: He would never read about the concentration camps. But that morning he had read the Eichmann tapes. He got sick. But he had to go on to the United States on a mission for European integration this time. Once in the plane seat, he blamed himself.
At the same time, he knew only too well that what he had called his "tory regime" was not only naive, but also untenable. The war got further away. New generations, who had not consciously experienced the war, grew up; In his family, too. To them, it was difficult to pretend that the Nazis and their practices had been an incident that you could hide away, something you could, as it were, live over with uplifting ideals. Still, he couldn't think of anything better. A sense of irresponsibility got to him.
It was something else that happened that morning. When he had greeted his teenage daughter in her bedroom before he left, the fear had struck him. The book he thought he saw in her hands was The 25th hour of Romanian writer Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu. He knew that this was the true sledgehammer that smashed his regime, and forever. During the flight he wrote about the incident in his diary: I have no right to leave her alone with these things, but what is there to explain? .14
Theologian and philosopher Gheorghiu worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania during the first years of World War II. When Soviet troops entered Romania in 1944, he fled his homeland. Then he was captured by the American army. During his captivity he wrote the novel The 25th hour, published in 1949 in French.15
The novel contained strong parallels with Gheorghiu's own experiences in the blood countries of central Europe, the hellish portal of the European division. The book sketches the extreme randomness in which ideals of creatability can degenerate. It is an intriguing report of unmanageable wanderings of people in the sinister worlds beyond citizenship, first in the Europe of Nazis, then in the Europe of liberators.
The peace was shaky, so clear and felt Kohnstamm. It scared him. The Europe of the European project, as well as the Netherlands of reconstruction, and its early institutions of the failed breakthrough; They were so vulnerable.
"Nothing is possible without man, nothing is sustainable without institutions," said Kohnstamm's teacher Jean Monnet. But were they strong and real enough, these new institutions, to be sustainable? Were these institutions of cooperation able to withstand the violence of those much older and deeper rooted institutions: Europe's bloodthirsty nation states? Or were they too beautiful and therefore too vulnerable . Too beautiful to be true?
File and Command
One of the things that today's Europe rediscovers is that the post-war American Europe perhaps existed mainly by the pardon of a desperate escapism; An all-encompassing desire for a final flight away from one's own politics and history.
A flight with which first Western Europe and later the whole of Europe collapsed into a more apolitical and comfortable atmosphere of policy, technocracy and Anglo-Saxon management of market forces, an escape from itself. An escape, which sometimes seemed to be a new Enlightenment, after the medieval darkness of the first half of Europe's twentieth century and the Cold War.16
However, as in the end any escape is only a temporary solution, so the post-war American Europe may well have been only a temporary one, built up of geopolitical, idealism, desperate hope and a glorious answer given from a historical American self-confidence. In short, the circumstances of a moment, circumstances that will once be overtaken by time, new and old times, by technology, traditions and old and new laws.
The post-war Europe of post-war Enlightenment has never replaced the older Europe. From a European perspective, European integration has never been more than a joint management of debt securities or debt securities for the worn-out nation states of Europe; Very successful, but never more than one resistant to decay.
That file is a nice file, just because it was so unfinished and variable and has remained.
The pursuit and achievement of universal ambitions, such as human rights, can only be carried out in a temporary way, and thus in constant change, for the alternative, the dogmatic means that, at some point, the rotten of totalitarianism will inevitably devour freedom and responsibility.
cherishing this beautiful file is difficult. If we want to protect its open spirit, we have to work on it. That's urgent.
The hope of a new Europe was explicitly expressed in Maastricht in 1991 in the Treaty on European Union.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty in 2017, Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, spoke at the Gouvernement in Maastricht.17 In her speech, she briefly outlined the enormous ambitions that had been laid down in black and white: "The Maastricht Treaty [...] was a revolution: For the first time in world history, building peace became the aspiration of an entire continent. .
But this European hope is still difficult to see, both in the media and in politics and in reality. Far too few people know and experience their existence.
It is up to us, now more than ever, to examine the Europe of European integration, our Europe, to assess it as critically as possible, to make it better, to change it without losing it, to imagine a better future. This is the only way to keep Europe and the Netherlands alive from liberation and cooperation, and to continue to put into practice the crucial European lesson on social conditions: That man is powerless without others and that wherever others are powerless, so is he or she.
Mathieu Segers is a historian and professor of contemporary European history at Maastricht University.
Endnotes
1 Norman Davies, 1997, Europe. A History (London: Pimlico), p. 14.
2 Margaret McMillan, 2013, The War that ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Random House).
3 Claudio Magris, 2019, Curved time in Krems (Amsterdam: The Busy Bee).
4 Roger Martin du Gard, 1922-1940, Les Thibault.
5 Nicola Chiaromonte, 1970, "Summer 1914." Historic Necessity and Individual Conscience & The Limits of the Possibility. The Paradox of History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 51-75.
6 Stefan Zweig, 1942, Die Welt von Gestern.
7 Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa, (2005) 2007, "The Europe of Melancholy ", The Federalist/Le Fédéraliste/Il Federalista, 1.
8 See for example: Max Kohnstamm and Mathieu Segers, 2008, The European diaries of Max Kohnstamm. August 1953 . September 1957 (Amsterdam: Boom); Anne Deighton, 2013, . Isaiah Berlin and Britain's early Cold Wars, Cold War History, 13, 4, p. 15 (online version).
9 Nelson D. Lankford, 1996, The Last American Aristocrat. The Biography of Ambassador David K.E. Bruce (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, p. 42-3); Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence, Jean Monnet American Sources, 106-114, David Bruce Diaries.
10 Curzio Malaparte, [1949] 2015, La pelle.
11 See for example: John Ikenberry, 1993, "Creating Yesterday's New World Order: Keynesian "New Thinking" and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlements, Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 58f; James, Harold, 1996, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 19-26; Mathieu Segers, 2019, "Eclipsing Atlantis: Trans-Atlantic multilateralism in trade and monetary affairs as a pre-history to the genesis of social market Europe (1942-1950), "Journal of Common Market Studies, 57, 1 January 2019," p. 60-76
12 Mathieu Segers, 2019, Travel to the continent. The Netherlands and European integration, 1950 to today (Amsterdam: Prometheus).
13 Max Kohnstamm, 2005, Letters from "Hitlers Herrengefängnis" (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij).
14 Max Kohnstamm and Mathieu Segers, 2011, Diep Spel. The European diaries of Max Kohnstamm. September 1957 February 1963 (Amsterdam: Boom), p. 187.
15 The English translation: Virgil Gheorgiu, 1949, The 25th hour (The Hague/Antwerp: Nederlandse Boekenclub).
16 Charles Maier, 1981, "The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twenteth-Century Western Europe," American Historical Review, 86, 2.
17 Federica Mogherini, 2017, "Thinking Europe Forward," speech on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Treaty of Maastricht, 28 September 2017, Government of Limburg, Maastricht.