The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  By contrast, the technocratic line descending from Saint-Simon inherited both his attachment to institutional projections and his economic productivism. This is the combination that allows it to claim paternity rights in the eventual process of European integration, when it came. Untroubled by imperial operations overseas—indeed, not infrequently promoting continental unity at home as a way to preserve colonial supremacy abroad—it was not hampered by scruples over where the line of peace should be drawn: it was enough that Europe itself should be secured from war, and devoted to the growth of industry and the progress of science, for the well-being of all its classes. But for that, detailed administrative and legal engineering was needed, requiring all the ingenuity, if less of the fantasy, of the first modern proposal for its reorganization. The closeness of much in the institutional thinking of this tradition to the shape of the actual Community that came into existence after the Second World War is striking. In some ways, however, no less so is the extent to which it foreshadowed problems that still dog the Union. Bluntschli, who produced perhaps the most impressive single anticipation of much of the design of the EU, explained, long before Paul Kirchhof or Dieter Grimm, why there could be no federal democracy in Europe.

  Federal union in America, he observed, was based on an American people bound together by a common country, language, culture, legal system and common interests. Europe, on the other hand, was composed of very different nations, divided in all these respects. There, only a confederation of states, where real political power must remain—not a sovereign parliament or an overall government—could advance the goals of a European public law, European peace, and common cultural concerns. ‘The political unity of a state without a people is a contradiction in terms. Since there is no European people, there can be no state called Europe’.67 Nor has one arisen. But if a hybrid quasi-state were to be constructed, on these premises it could only be done from above, by those capable of joining and ruling over a popular void. The logic of such elitism is still with us. The elite does not contain as many scientists, though certainly as many bureaucrats and executives, as Saint-Simon would have wished; it is not confined to cabinets, as Bluntschli imagined it would be; nor is it adorned with many aristocrats, of birth or spirit, as hoped by Coudenhove. But of its character as a construction from on high, by—according to contemporary lights—the best and the brightest, there can be little doubt. It was Coudenhove who foresaw, and welcomed, the corollary. Writing in the twenties, he remarked that for the moment democracy was a protection against chaos. But in the Europe of the future, ‘once a new, authentic nobility is constituted, democracy will disappear of itself’.68 In that respect, today’s EU would not have disappointed him.

  What of the conservative tradition? Its legacies surfaced later, once regime change in the economies of the West had set in, and the Cold War was won. Then, as the EU expanded to the east, the principles of 1815–23 came into their own again: not balance, but coordination of powers, to police zones of potential turbulence and ensure ideological placidity, in the spirit of the Protocol of Troppau. Well before it was openly theorized, a modern droit d’ingérence was being practised by Brussels, wherever developments in the lands of former communism fell short of the expectations of a new Concert of Europe. The restoration of capitalism was naturally a very different affair from that of absolutism, its interventions more economic and political than military. But as successive actions in the Balkans would show, where force was required it would be used. The new legitimism speaks of the rule of law and human rights, not the sanctity of thrones. But geo-politically, the pedigree of even such modest operations as EUFOR and EULEX goes back to Chateaubriand’s cent mille fils de Saint Louis.

  Yet such continuities have been perhaps the less important bequest of this line to Brussels, since the principles of a Concert of Powers are no longer specifically European, but Atlantic; even, in the new century, increasingly if still imperfectly, global. Where the greatest strength of the conservative tradition always lay was rather in its speculations on what distinguished Europe from the rest of the world. This heuristic, not programmatic, concern it paradoxically inherited from the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, since the alternative traditions, revolutionary or technocratic, were, of course, politically closer to the Enlightenment. Yet in the pursuit of the practical goal of a European unity that could no longer be assumed as a meta-political reality in the manner of the philosophes, they largely abandoned its intellectual agenda. In the conservative tradition, on the other hand, where constructivist slogans of a United States of Europe rarely had any standing, the question of what defined the singularity of Europe as a meaningful unit in the first place remained a central preoccupation. The result was to leave an intellectually richer deposit of ideas than either of the other traditions. The plurality of states celebrated by the Enlightenment became the diversity of forces, cultures and powers that set Europe apart from the rest of the world—the advantages of quantity transformed into virtues of quality. In the spiritual arsenal of the Union, that too lives on. But in an after-life that is less predictable.

  1. Denis de Rougemont, Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe, Paris 1961. For a vibrant homage to the work and the man from today’s president of the European Commission, see Barroso’s address of October 2006, on the centenary of his birth.

  2. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, London 1993, pp. 306–14.

  3. For documentation, see Denis Hay, The Idea of Europe, Edinburgh 1957, who dates the first usage of the term ‘European’ to the Piccolomini pope, Pius II (1458–64), and the first significant substitution of ‘Europe’ for ‘Christendom’ to Commynes (scripsit 1488–1501): pp. 83–9.

  4. H. D. Schmidt, ‘The Establishment of “Europe” as a Political Expression’, The Historical Journal, IX, 2, 1966, pp. 172–8.

  5. ‘Observations on the Abbé de St Pierre’s ‘Project for a Perpetual Peace’, in Patrick Riley (ed.), The Political Writings of Leibniz, Cambridge 1972, pp. 180–1.

  6. Pensées, I (1720–1734), §318, Paris 1991 (ed. Desgraves), p. 281.

  7. Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), Ch. II, Paris 1937 (ed. Bourgeois), p. 10.

  8. Le Droit des gens, III, Ch. 3, § 47, London 1958, facsimile, pp. 39–40.

  9. The History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), Preface, New York 1833 (ed. Harper), p. v.

  10. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781), Vol. II, Ch. 38, Harmondsworth 1994 (ed. Womersley), p. 511.

  11. Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), I, London 1893 (ed. Keene), pp. 74–5.

  12. De l’esprit des lois (1748), XVII, 3, Oeuvres complètes, II, Paris 1949 (ed. Caillois), p. 526; also XVII, 5, p. 529, dwelling on the natural geographical divisions of Europe as a bulwark of its freedoms.

  13. The History of the Reign of Charles V, Bk. 12, p. 488. Robertson repeated Montesquieu’s comparison of Europe with Asia, invoking Genghis Khan and Tamerlane sweeping everything like a torrent before them.

  14. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Vol. I, Ch. 3 (ed. Womersley), p. 106.

  15. Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Ch. II, p. 11.

  16. Le Droit des gens, III, Ch. 3, §47, p. 40.

  17. Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Ch. XXXIV, pp. 654–64.

  18. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), Vol. III, Ch. 53 (ed. Womersley), p. 421.

  19. Pensées, §1006, pp. 379–80.

  20. The History of the Reign of Charles V, p. 489. By contrast, for Montesquieu, ‘Europe, in mastering the commerce of the three other parts of the world, has become their tyrant’: Pensées, §568, p. 320. Robertson’s sermon commemorating the Glorious Revolution dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the trope of emulation: ‘All the civilized nations of Europe may be considered as forming one exclusive community. The intercourse among them is great, and every improvement in science, in arts, in commerce, in government introduced into any of them is soon known in others, and in time is adopted and imitated. Hence
arises the general resemblance among all the peoples of Europe, and their great superiority over the rest of mankind’. See Richard Sher, ‘1688 and 1788: William Robertson on Revolution in Britain and France’, in Paul Dukes and John Dunkley (eds), Culture and Revolution, London 1990, p. 102.

  21. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée (1770–71), Ch. 3, Paris 1782, pp. 17–18. Earlier, Rousseau had been more indulgent, speaking favourably of Europe as being—unlike ‘Asia or Africa, a notional collection of peoples who have only in common the name’—‘a true society with its own religion, customs and even laws, from which none of the peoples who compose it can detach themselves without immediately causing troubles’: ‘Extrait du projet de paix perpétuelle’ (1760), Oeuvres, III, Paris 1964, p. 567.

  22. De la réorganisation de la société europeénne, Paris 1814, pp. 7–9, 24–26, 33–40, 47, 58–9, 63, 75–81, 97. The merits of the English constitution, Saint-Simon stressed, were also responsible for the country’s prosperity, which Europe would enjoy under a similar system.

  23. Compare the fate of a virtually contemporaneous scheme. In May 1814, the budding philosopher Karl Christian Krause had published Entwurf eines europäischen Staatenbundes in Leipzig, inspired by Kant’s sketch for a perpetual peace, in the legally minded line of German idealism. Having defeated France, the victorious monarchies were urged to create—pre-eminently at German initiative—a European confederation, capital ideally in Berlin, with a view to later world government when other continents had followed this example. The text attracted no attention, falling, like the rest of Krause’s writing—influential only, generations later, in Spain—into oblivion in his own country.

  24. De la politique générale et du rôle de la France en Europe, Paris 1840, pp. 26–31; Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socalism, Berkeley—Los Angeles 2001, pp. 373–5, 402–5 ff.

  25. Mazzini linked the emergence of a European literature with the rise of political economy. Europe was ‘one vast common market’, and was ‘marching—by the common consent of her populations—towards a new era of union, of more intimate association, in which, under the influence of one general thought, the people will at last look upon one another as members of one great family’, so many ‘labourers in the great workshop of nature, distributed according to their position, their special aptitude or their vocation, but all contributing to one work, whose fruits are to enlarge and strengthen the life of all’: ‘La Lega Internazionale dei Popoli’ (1847), a text originally published in English in Edinburgh. Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 36, Imola 1922, pp. 8–10. For Cattaneo, see the final lines of Dell’ insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra. Memorie, Brussels 1849, p. 306: ‘In a Europe entirely free and friendly, the unity of the barracks will give way to popular liberty; and the edifice constructed by kings and emperors can be rebuilt on the pure American model. The principle of nationality, provoked and enormously strengthened by the military oppression that seeks to destroy it, will dissolve the accidental empires of Eastern Europe, and transform them into federations of free peoples. We will have true peace, when we have a United States of Europe’.

  26. ‘Discours d’ouverture du congrès de la paix’ (1849), in Oeuvres complètes: Politique, Paris 1985 (ed. Fizaine), pp. 299–304.

  27. Proudhon: Du principe fédératif et de la nécessité de reconstituer le parti de la révolution, Paris 1863, pp. 88–94; Bakunin: ‘Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme’ (1867), in Oeuvres, Paris 1902, pp. 14–21.

  28. Kautsky, ‘Krieg und Frieden. Betrachtungen zur Maifeier’, Die neue Zeit, 1910–11, Bd 2, pp. 105–6; Luxemburg, ‘Friedensutopien’ (1911), Gesammelte Werke, Bd 2, Berlin 1974, pp. 499–504.

  29. ‘On the Slogan of a United States of Europe’ (1915), Collected Works, Vol. 21, Moscow 1974, pp. 339–43.

  30. Respectively: ‘Programma Mira’, Nashe Slovo, No. 86, 11 April 1916; ‘Razoruzhenie i Soedinennye Shtaty Evropy’, Biulleten’ oppozitsii, No. 6, October 1929, pp. 9–14.

  31. ‘Il Manifesto di Ventotene’ (1941), in Luciano Angelino, Le forme dell’Europa. Spinelli o della federazione, Genoa 2003, pp. 187–201: both the social and the jacobin sections of the manifesto were drafted by Rossi, the giellista, rather than Spinelli, the expelled communist.

  32. In which his first editorial took Saint-Simon’s De la réorganisation as a founding reference: Donatella Cherubini, ‘Si Vis Pacem Para Libertatem et Justitiam’, in Marta Petricioli, Donatella Cherubini and Alessandra Anteghini, Les États Unis d’Europe. Un Project Pacifiste, Berne 2004, p. 22. The term ‘pacifist’ in the title and texts of this volume are to be taken in the Italian, not English sense, as meaning opposition to unjust wars, not rejection of violence as such.

  33. Les États Unis d’Europe, Paris 1872, pp. 175–8; a work now looking back to Kant more than Saint-Simon, reproached with tactical concessions to the diplomats assembled in Vienna. Another who was driven to think of continental unity by the Franco-Prussian War was Ernest Renan, pleading with David Strauss for a European federation in 1870, a fortnight after the capitulation of Sedan: ‘Lettre à M. Strauss’; Oeuvres complètes, Vol. I, Paris 1947, pp. 437–48. Even as late as his famous essay ‘Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’ of 1882, in many respects a hymn to nationalism, as properly understood, Renan could still observe that one day a European confederation would no doubt come about.

  34. ‘Die Organisation des europäischen Statenvereines’, Gesammelte kleine Schriften, Bd 2, Aufsätze über Politik and Völkerrecht, Nördlingen 1881, pp. 279–312.

  35. Congrès des sciences politiques de 1900, Les États-Unis d’Europe, Paris 1901, pp. 10, 22, 11–13, 15–18 (Leroy-Beaulieu); 144–5, 147–55 (Isambert). Europe’s colonial vocation was taken for granted by both speakers. Leroy-Beaulieu’s brother, the economist Paul, was a leading champion of French imperial expansion in the Third Republic, close to Jules Ferry. Had Europe been united, Isambert explained, it could have stopped the United States seizing the Spanish colonies, and restrained British aggression against the Boers. Settlers, though certainly not natives, should be counted in the proportionate allocation of each nation’s representatives in a European legislature. Such notes were not dissonant in this line of descent: in 1814 Saint-Simon himself had already stressed overseas settlement as one of the great missions of the Europe to come: De la réorganisation, p. 52.

  36. Pan-Europa, Vienna 1924, pp. 53–8, 42–4, 157–63. Coudenhove, whose mother was Japanese, held Czech citizenship after 1918 (his estates were in Bohemia); for Hitler he was the ‘world’s bastard’. A good biography of him is still lacking. After the Second World War, Churchill wrote a preface to one of his autobiographies, Franz-Josef Strauss another to his advocacy of Europe as a world power.

  37. For particulars, see the careful documentation in Anita Ziegerhofer-Prettenhaler, Botschafter Europas. Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwangziger und dreissiger Jahren, Vienna–Cologne–Weimar 2004, pp. 106–16.

  38. Adel, Vienna 1923, p. 31.

  39. ‘Between the conflicting powers no peace can be concluded—all peace is mere illusion, mere truce. From the standpoint of cabinets, and common consciousness, no unification is conceivable. Both parties have great and urgent claims and must make them, driven by the spirit of the world and of mankind. Both are indestructible powers in the heart of man: on the one side reverence for antiquity, dependence on historical institutions, love of the monuments of ancestors and of the ancient and glorious family of the state, and joy in obedience; on the other side, the delightful sensation of freedom, unlimited expectation of tremendous provinces of activity, pleasure in things new and young, unconstrained contact with fellow members of the state, pride in human brotherhood, joy in personal rights and property of the whole, and the powerful feeling of citizenship. Let neither of these two hope to destroy the other. All conquests are meaningless here, for the innermost ca
pital of every kingdom lies not behind earth walls and is not be taken by storm’, Novalis declaimed. ‘Blood will wash over Europe until the nations perceive the frightful madness that drives them round in circles’, and ‘a feast of love is celebrated as a festival of peace amid hot tears on smoking battlefields’. Die Christenheit oder Europa. Ein Fragment, Stuttgart 1966, pp. 44–6: in English, Hymns to the Night and Other Selected Writings, Indianapolis 1960, pp. 60–61 (translation modified).

  40. For the history of the suppression and manipulation of the text, see Wm. Arctander O’Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution, Durham 1995, pp. 227–30. Schlegel, who invented the title ‘Christianity or Europe’ for it, tried to have the work destroyed in 1815. Burke—himself not spared Novalis’s irony—would have been acutely alarmed by it. In a mystical register, its terse incandescence stands comparison perhaps only with The Communist Manifesto.

  41. Europa. Eine Zeitschrift (1802–3), Darmstadt 1963 (ed. Behler), pp. 2, 28–32. Mannigfältigkeit is always the key term, here and in subsequent texts.

  42. Über die neuere Geschichte, Vienna 1811, pp. 15, 11–12.

  43. When a major state of Europe was so internally unhinged as to endanger its neighbours, they were entitled to intervene in it, not simply on grounds of political prudence, but as a matter of ‘international law, properly understood’: Von dem politischen Zustande von Europa vor und nach der französischen Revolution, Berlin 1801, Vol. 1, p. 207. The French Revolution, naturally, was just such a case. Three decades later, he continued to uphold the ‘unlimited right of intervention’ of any sovereign who felt their security threatened by developments in a state nearby: ‘Bemerkungen über das Interventions-Recht’ (March 1831), in Schriften von Fredrich von Gentz. Eine Denkmal, Vol. 5, Mannheim 1840 (ed. Schlesier), pp. 181–3.