De Eerste Kamer en Europa - Eerste Kamer der Staten-Generaal

“Europeans
today are in
many ways
unconscious
slaves to ancient
assumptions.”
76 De Eerste Kamer en Europa
Our current political institutions in Europe – the ones that we have been talking about
today – are mostly products of the post-1945 world. Many of them were created
explicitly to solve the problems of the early twentieth century. They worked: those
problems are gone and we now face new ones. To evaluate how well these institutions
deal with our problems, we need to understand their origins. Even more important are
the ideas behind these institutions. Europeans today are in many ways unconscious
slaves to ancient assumptions about their place in the world and about the special
value of their civilisation. So I want to begin by exploring the idea of Europe briefly and
then ask when, how and in what ways Europe “made” the world we live in, whether it
still does, and if not, how much that really matters in thinking about the problems that
face the continent today.
It is possible to be tyrannised by concepts as much as by people, perhaps more
effectively, in fact, since the tyranny of concepts is often invisible. Today we are
tyrannised sometimes by a concept that was imported 50 years ago from psychology
into social studies, i.e. the concept of identity. A century ago, which is not long in the
scheme of things, this word was scarcely used except by philosophers. Today it is everywhere.
Everyone, every individual, every people, every nation, is supposed to have their
own identity. Terrible things happen if you have got the wrong kind – the Germans were
once supposed to have an authoritarian personality – or worse still if your identity is
split, conflicted or torn. According to some commentators Muslim males today suffer
from the consequences of sexual repression and hypocrisy. Perhaps people have
identities, but whether Europe has an identity seems to me deeply doubtful, for reasons
that will become clear. But a version of the concept of a European identity – the idea of
Europe, in other words – certainly has a long and rich past. That is where we should
begin.
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In this concept, and its history, indeterminacy of geography jostles with cultural
certainty, or more precisely, with the claim to cultural primacy. Take geography first.
From the strictly geographical point of view, Europe is merely a western prolongation
of Asia, with no clear eastern border separating the one from the other. Geographers’
decisions, like those of the 18th century Russian savant Tatischev, who nominated the
Urals as the dividing line between Europe and Asia, were essentially arbitrary and
motivated by political or cultural considerations, in his case the desire to break with
the then current fashion of linking Moscovy and its heirs to Asia and the East.
The same desire to separate “Europe” from the dreaded “East” is visible in our own day
too. During the Cold War, European history really meant west European history. The
European Economic Community did not refer to all of Europe, but just to a small
number of western and north-western states. Since 1989 countries like Poland, the
Czech Republic and Hungary – which we used to think were in eastern Europe – have
reasserted the idea of “central Europe”, shoving themselves westwards mentally as it