Introduction To European Studies Reader

Introduction to European Studies
Senior Lecturer Dr. Dan D. Lazea
1. Non-European origins of Europe

Pagden (2002: 33-38)
2. From city-states to Roman Empire: political life in Europe
Pagden (2002: 38-45)
3. Southern and Eastern frontiers of Europe from Medieval times to EU
Pagden (2002: 45-54)
4. Some Europes in Their History. The geographical concept of Europe
Pagden (2002: 55-62)
5. Some Europes in Their History. The Enlightened narrative
Pagden (2002: 62-67)
6. Some Europes in Their History. Another Europe in history
Pagden (2002: 67-70)
7. Homo Oeconomicus and Homo Politicus. Middle ages versus Antiquity in Max Weber
Pagden (2002: 134-38)
8. Challenging Kants Cosmopolitan project: Cultural pluralism
Pagden (2002: 341-47)
9. European imperialism and the social construction of Orientalism
Said (1978: 201-208)
10. The Balkans as the Orient at home: Romanian case
Goldsworthy (1998: 185-194)
11. Central European identity after the end of the Cold War
Todorova (2009: 140-147)
12. Eastern Europe, Balkans, Western Balkans: new political concepts
Todorova (2009: 190-199)
13. The ideological basis of the two racisms in Europe
MacMaster (2001: 209-216)
Bibliography
GOLDSWORTHY, Vera (1998) Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
MacMASTER, Neil (2001) Racism in Europe. Houndmills: Palgrave.
PAGDEN, Anthony ed. (2002) The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
SAID, Edward (1978) Orientalism. Harmondswortk: Penguin.
TODOROVA, Maria (2009) Imagining the Balkans, updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
1
Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent
ANTHONY P AGDE N
The identity of Europe has always been uncertain and imprecise, a

source of pride for some and hatred or contempt for others. Like all identities it is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions. It
is also particularly elusive because continents, far more than nations, tend
to be simply geographical expressions. In recent times, postcolonial times,
collective identitiesat least in the face of oppositionhave become commonplace elsewhere. But before the nineteenth century few would have
said that they were Asian or African, andsomething that the peoples of the United States tend to forgetAmerican has always been
carefully qualified in virtually every language but English. Only Europeans
have persistently described themselves, usually when faced with cultures
they found indescribably alien, to be not merely British or German or
Spanish but also European: we Europeans (nos Europai), as the English
philosopher Francis Bacon said in 1623.1
Because it is collective, there are those who have argued that any such
thing as a European identity is, at best, an illusion. Europe now exists
as an economic, and increasingly political, entity. But this has no wider
cultural or affective meaning. It merely describes the signatory states of
the Maastricht Treaty. Yet if that is all Europe was now, or had ever been,
the Maastricht Treaty would never have come into being. For behind the
limited, practical conditions that have brought together a series of postwar states on the continent of Europe into a loose federation lies a very
long history.
The origins of this history are to be found in a fictional but forever
compelling story, one of abduction, and of a metamorphosis. It is the
1
Francis Bacon quoted in John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
(London: HarperCollins, 1993), 3.
33
34
ANTHONY PAGDEN
story of Europa, daughter of Agenor, king of the city of Tyre on the

coast of Sidon. One fine day she was carried off by Zeus, transformed
into a white bull. Zeus deposited her, and ravished her, on the shore of
the continent that would bear their offspring and her name. This is the
myth. As with all myths, however, there is another more mundane version. It was suggested by the Greek writer Herodotus and later seized
upon by the early Christian theologian Lactantius, eager to debunk and
demystify such unsettling erotic fantasies from the ancient world. In this
version Cretan merchants abduct Europa in a ship shaped like a bull and
take her to be a bride for their king Asterius. Since the Cretans are what
later generations would come to call Europeans, and Europa herself an
Asian woman, her abduction was taken by all Asians to be an affront.
Later the Trojans, also a people of what we now call Asia Minor, seize
a (not wholly unwilling) Helen, wife of Menelaus, in revenge. In turn,
Menelauss brother, Agamemnon, raises an army, crosses the sea, and begins the most celebrated war in European history. The Persians, Herodotus
tells us (and Persians is his shorthand for all the peoples of Asia), found
this tale of abduction puzzling. We in Asia, they say, regarded the rape
of our women not at all, thus establishing an enduring Asian cultural
stereotype, but the Greeks all for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman
mustered a great host, came to Asia and destroyed the power of Priam.
Ever since then we have regarded the Greeks as our enemies.2 What
in myth had been a divine appropriation becomes in mythopoeic history a tale of the hatred between two continents, a hatred that would
burn steadily down the centuries, as the Trojans were succeeded by the
Phoenicians, the Phoenicians by the Ottoman Turks, and the Turks by
Russians.
No myth, however, is as simple as that. Most myths are tales of metamorphoses where everything is not merely not all it seems but is frequently
its very opposite. For fleeing from the ruins of Troy, with his father
Anchises on his back and leading his son Ascanius by his hand, comes
Aeneas, who years later will land on the shores of Latium and found
the city and the state of Rome. It is Rome that will be the true creator
of Europe. But Rome, too, will try to shed its mythopoeic oriental
identity. When Virgil, in the first century CE, came to write the Aeneid
under the emperor Augustus, he told another story that would preserve
the link with Troy while at the same time effacing all traces of Trojan
identity. In the twelfth and final book of the poem, the gods, who have
2
Histories, I, 34.
35
(as gods do) taken different sides in the struggles between the invading
Trojans and the native Latins, decide to bring the war to an end. Juno,
who has supported the Latins, finally agrees to allow the two peoples to
intermarry and thereby create a new race. But she insists that his new race
will look like the Latins, will dress like the Latins, will speak like the
Latins, and their customstheir moreswill be Latin. All they will preserve of their oriental ancestors will be their gods, for those gods were also
the gods of the Greeks, and the common patrimony of all humankind.3
Europe, which will fashion itself for generations in opposition to Asia,
has always owed to Asia its historical origins.
This sense of double ambiguity survives even the collapse of the political structures of the Graeco-Roman world and the dominance of GraecoRoman origin myths. Christianity was to provide Europe with much of
its subsequent sense of both internal cohesion and its relationship with
the rest of the world, and Christianity began as an Asian religion. Jesus
Christ, who is the way the truth and the life, has long since given the Bill
of Divorce to ingrateful Asia where he was born and of Africa the place
of his flight and refuge, and has become almost wholly European, wrote
Samuel Purchas, the English propagandist for the settlement of America,
in 1625 in an attempt to secure the glory of Christs apostolate, and of
the overseas mission, exclusively for Europe.4 Almost wholly because
not even Purchas could entirely discount the existence of the Greek and
Russian Churches and their failure to submit to the authority of the Papacy
or, as the English fitfully hoped, convert to Protestantism. The fact that the
undeniably Christian adherents of Greek Orthodoxy had for long been
under Ottoman rule, and thus fully absorbed into Asia, remained an additional reminder of the alien origin of Christianity. Greek and Russian
Christianity, as J. G. A Pocock reminds us in this volume, would always be
a threat to any sustained attempt to fabricate a single European identity
with a single origin.
Thus an abducted Asian woman gave Europe her name; a vagrant
Asian exile gave Europe its political and finally it cultural identity; and
an Asian prophet gave Europe its religion. As Hegel was later to observe,
Europe was the centre and end of History, but History had begun in
Asia: characteristically the Orient quarter of the globethe region of
3
4
Aeneid, XII, 80842. I would like to thank Maurizio Bettini for drawing this passage, and
its significance, to my attention.
Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of
the World, in Sea Voyages and Lande-Travells by Englishmen & Others, 5 vols. (London,
1625), I, 45.
36
ANTHONY PAGDEN
origination.5 The course of civilization, like that of empire and the sun
itself, moves inexorably from East to West.
In the beginning, however, the world was divided not into two but
three: Europe, Asia, and Libya, as Africa was generally called (although
as Herodotus, the first to travel well beyond the limits of his own home
and who reveled in the oddities of the behavior of those he found there,
complained, with characteristic Greek misogyny, he could not conceive
why three names, and womens names at that, should have been given
to a tract which is in reality one).6 For most Greeks the difference between what they called Europeby which they frequently if not consistently meant Hellas, the lands around the Aegean Seaand Asia or
Africa would remain, as it had been for Aeschylus, one not only of climate and disposition, but also of race (ethnos). Herodotus, however, had
understood that Europe had no natural frontiers and that, as most
subsequent cosmopolitans came to realize through experience, cultures
are never so incommensurable as their members often like to suppose. If
Europe had come to acquire an identity, it was always one that had
to accommodate the uneasy realization that not only were the origins of
Europe non-European, but that no one could establish with any precision
where Europe stopped and Asia and Africa began.
If this geographical uncertainty meant that the landmass of Europe
could not be said to be at the center of the world, it still could be placed
at the center of some other conceptualization of the environment. For the
Greeks and their Roman heirs, the means of establishing a relationship
between them and the rest of humanity frequently rested upon a complex theory of climate and physical environment. The northern parts of
the world, according to this theory, were inhabited by peoples whose inhospitable climates had made them brave and warlike, but also uncouth,
unthinking, andto use the Latinized term that will become central to all
modes of European self-fashioninguncivilized. Those who lived in
the Souththe Asianswere, by contrast, quick-witted, intelligent, but
also lethargic, slow to act, and ultimately corrupta claim that became
in time another enduring stereotype of the Oriental. Europeans (then
the peoples of the Mediterranean), living as they did midway between
these extremes, are the mean. This conception of Europe, much modified
it is true, but still insistent on the radical distinction between North and
South, retained its imaginative force until at least the nineteenth century.
5
6
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications,
1956), 99101.
Histories, VII, 104.
37
(The current use of the terms by the United Nations and international aid
agencies to mean, roughly, the developed and the developing worlds
is perhaps unintentionally a continuation of the same distinction.) Even
Hegel, writing in the 1830s from the viewpoint of an intellectually and
culturally emergent North, could still speak confidently of the Mediterranean as the uniting element of three quarters of the globe and the
centre of World-Historyonce, that is, he had relegated America firmly
to the domain of the future, where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the Worlds History shall reveal itself.7 As late as the 1960s, the
great French historian Fernand Braudel was able to refer (with no trace
of irony) to the Mediterranean as the radiant centre of the entire globe,
whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without ones being
able to define the exact boundary between light and shade.8
Europe, wrote the first-century Greek geographer Strabo, in the earliest surviving attempt to demonstrate and explain the continents perception of its superiority over all others, is both varied in form and
admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men
and governments. The two instincts in man (the peaceable, which Strabo
significantly called the agricultural and the civilized, and the warlike)
live in Europe side by side, and the one that is peace-loving is more
numerous and thus keeps control over the whole body.9 In Strabos account the Greek dialectic between the world of nature (physis) and that
of men (nomos, a term that relates to law and custom or as we would say
culture) has been resolved in Europe and only in Europe.
Because of this harmony, Europe becomesin another image that has
survived unbroken to this daythe home of liberty and of true government. The Greeks, Herodotus tells us, are the most free of peoples, because, unlike the Asians, they are subject, not to the will of an individual,
but only to the law. European society might have had many forms of government, some of them decidedly less liberal than others, but centuries
later Voltaire echoed an enduring commonplace when he claimed that
the continent constituted a kind of great republic divided into several
states, all of which were united in having the same principle of public
law and politics, unknown in other parts of the world.10 As Montesquieu
7
8
9
10
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 86.

Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a lepoque de Philippe II,
2d ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 2 vols., I, 168.
Strabo, Geography, 2.5, 26.
Quoted in Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1968), 123.
38
ANTHONY PAGDEN
had remarked some years earlier, most of Europe (he was a little uncertain
about Spain) is ruled by custom (les moeurs); Asia, and the still darker
regions of Africa and America, by despots.11
The rule of law, restraint through custom rather than will, was responsible for the fashioning of societies that provided a space for individual human action, while at the same time ensuring that such action
was rarely capable of reducing society to a state of simple anarchy. From
this we will see the descent of the notion that all human improvement depends upon conflict, that human beings are, by their nature, competitive
creatures, and that only those societies that know how to harness what
Kant in the late eighteenth century called mans unsocial sociability
instead of attempting to suppress it will flourish.12 As Machiavelli noted,
the power of the Roman Republic had derived from the opposition between the Senate and the plebians and not from the exercise of a common will, as so many had supposed.13 There was from the beginning
the conviction, which the modern democratic societies of the West have
inherited, that this vision of the world was in the longif not always
in the shortrun suitable for all peoples everywhere and that its cultural power was irresistible. This assumption could have emerged only
within a collection of societies, which, while being in many significant
respects very different from one another, shared the sense of a common
identity.
How the highly chauvinist Greeks could speak of themselves as members of a larger grouping of peoples, which must have included non-Greek
speakers and thus, in the Greek understanding of the term, barbarians,
is probably impossible to determine. The Greeks, however, had always
been peoples on the move (poluplanes)extreme travellers. Some time
in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus traveled to Egypt and Libya, to Babylon
and the Phoenician city of Tyre, even to southern Russia, and reported
extensively on what he had found there. Phythagoras, the great sixthcentury mathematician, journeyed from his native Samos to Egypt and
Crete before settling finally in Croton in southern Italy, and the earliest
of the ancient geographers, Hecateus of Miletus, visited Egypt even before Herodotus had. By the third century, the rhetorician Isocrates could
11
12
13
De lesprit des lois, VIII, 8, Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris:
Gallimard, 1951), 2 vols., II, 356.
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant:
Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 445.
See Quentin Skinner, Machiavellis Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizo Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12141.
39
confidently declare that being a Hellene was no longer a matter of blood

or racial origin, but one of culture and education.14
This sense of a possible communion with all the peoples of the inhabited world (oikoumene) may have been due, as Strabo suggests, to the fact
that Europe could provide for itself all the fruits that are best and that
are necessary for life and all the useful metals and imported only luxury
goods, species and precious stones that he says dismissively make the
life of persons who have a scarcity of them fully as happy as those who
have them in abundance.15 Only Europe as a continent, crisscrossed
by trade routes from East to West, could do this, but none of the many
disparate peoples of the Mediterranean could do it alone. Life was so
difficult for those peoples that they could survive only by developing the
great commercial networks that would become the basis of their future
expansion far beyond the limits of Europe. Because of the intense competition that persisted among them, they were all forced into the political
unions called the symmachiai and sympoliteiai that dominated the later
world of the Greek city-states, until at the battle of Chaeronea in August
338, Philip of Macedon swept it away altogether. This combination of
strength and dependency made the recognition of a shared political culture difficult to withhold. The cities of Ancient Greece, wrote Edward
Gibbon of the origins or modern Europe,
were cast in the happy mixture of union and interdependence which is repeated
on a larger scale, but in a looser form, by the nations of modern Europe; the union
of religion, language, and manners which renders them spectators and judges of
each others merits; the independence of government and interests, which asserts
their separate freedoms, and excites them to strive for pre-eminence in the career
of glory.16
This political culture was centered upon a unique form of life: the city.
Of course, as in most other civilizations, the vast majority of the populations of Europe actually lived and worked in the countryside until well
into the nineteenth century. For most of the rural peoples of Europe, and
the illiterate majority in the cities themselves, identity was a question of
attachment to microcommunities: the parish, the village, the guild, sometimes the country, the pays (or what the Castilians aptly called the patria
14
15
16
Francois Hartogth, Memoires dUlysse: Recits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Paris:
Gallimard, 1996), 1213.
Strabo, Geography, 2.5, 26.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David
Wormersley (London: Penguin Books, 1995), I, 106.
40
ANTHONY PAGDEN
chica, the small homeland), only rarely the nation, and never, one suspects, such an abstract cultural grouping as Europe. But for the literate, intellectual elites who had far more in common with similar groups
from other nations than they did with their own peasantry, the spaces
beyond the city walls were, until they became sentimentalized in the mideighteenth century, largely invisible. What Voltaire mockingly called the
supposed savages of America were in his view indistinguishable from
those savages one met every day in the countryside, living in huts with
their mates and a few animals ceaselessly exposed to all the intemperance
of the seasons.17
Despite its dependence upon agriculture, despite the real distribution
of its populations, Europe, as a collection of social and political groups
with a shared and historically-determined culture, was conceived as overwhelmingly urban. Our entire political and social vocabulary derives from
this fact. Politics and polity have their root in the Greek term polis.
Similarly, civil, civility, and civilization have their origins in the
Latin word civitas, which describes the same spatial, political, and cultural entity. Both polis and civitas became, in time, abstract nouns, sometimes translatable as the state or the commonwealth, and definable
in abstract terms. But originally they belonged to a semantic field that
described the urban space itself, and a close association between urban
ways of life and true civility persists to this day. Cities were, of course,
by no means unique to Europe. Like all else that defines European culture,
the walled, largely self-governing urban space had originated in Asia.
With the rise of Athens after the sixth century, an association in the
European political imaginaire began to form between an urban environment and a particular way of life. Man, said Aristotle, was zoon
politikonquite literally an animal made for life in the polis. True,
he was not the only such animal. Bears and ants were observed to be
similarly sociable. But hisand in the Greek world it was always his
way of being in the world was for him not merely the best attainable
existence. It was what the Greeks called the good life, the only life in
which it was possible for man to achieve his ends as a man, to achieve
that elusive goal that Aristotle termed eudaimonia, his Latin, Christian
translators, blessedness, and later writers rendered as happiness, or
by the clumsy term employed by many modern philosophers, human
flourishing.
17
Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et lesprit des nations, ed. R. Pomeau (Paris: Classiques
Garnier, 1990), 2 vols., I, 23.
41
Furthermore, true politeiai were like the persons who inhabited them,
autonomous entities. They were places of autarkeia, or self-sufficiency,
self-governing, autonomous; they were what in the Latin Aristotelian tradition came to be called perfect communities. This is also the moral
force behind Strabos claim that Europe was, unlike Asia, self-sufficient
in foodstuffs since the ability to provide for ones own material needs suggests a high degree of personal autonomy. Little wonder that for Aristotle
there could be no life beyond the limits of the city but that of beasts and
Gods.18 Because humans, unlike both beasts and Gods, were guided by
rules, by laws and customs, the city was also the source of law. Those who
lived within it had to abide by its rules. Beyond was the wilderness, what
later writers would describe as the state of nature. All humans began
in this condition, and all humans are constantly threatened by it. In the
Greek worldview, and in the conceptions of generations of Europeans,
to live in the state of nature, to live like a barbarian or a savage,
meant living as something less than human. The polis was, in this way,
a bounded space. But it was also conceived as a community that could
even transform all those who entered it. Aristotleto whom we owe much
of what we now know about the place of the polis in Greek life, although
he celebrated the city of Athens and wrote her political historywas an
outsider by birth.
This identification of a distinctive European communal life with a specific environment reached its peak with the effective domination of the
whole of what we now call Europe, and much of Asia, by the greatest
city of them all: Rome. Like the Greek cities to which it was heir, Rome
was the source of law, the place of custom, mores, which in the poet
Virgils punning vision was now encircled and protected by its massive
walls (moenia).19 Unlike the Greek city-states, Rome (particularly after
the collapse of the Republic) depended heavily for its political identity and
continuing survival on the vast areas of Europe and Asia over which it exercised authority. Thus, to a far greater degree than its Greek antecedents,
it welcomed outsiders within its walls, andat least during the periods
when this particular civic community offered stability, security, and the
access to world powerit proved to be enormously attractive. It might
be said, wrote James Wilson as he reflected upon the possible future
of the United States as a new Rome in the West, not that the Romans
18
19
Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 129.

Bellum ingens geret Italia, populosque feroces
contundet moresque viris et moenia ponet
Aeneid 1, 2634.
42
ANTHONY PAGDEN
extended themselves over the whole globe, but that the inhabitants of the
globe poured themselves upon the Romans.20
It is, therefore, unsurprising that by the first century CE, this Roman
Empire, which was merely an extension in space of the city of Rome, the
poet Horaces Prince among Cities (princeps urbium), had come to be
identified simply with the world, the orbis terrarum.21 After the establishment of the Emperor Augustuss new regime in 27 BCE, these imperial longings became formally expansionist to the point where Rome was
transformedimaginatively at leastinto a world-state, bounded in
Virgils words only by Oceanus.22 This did not mean that the Romans
ignored the actual existence of the rest of the globe, nor that they ever
seriously aspired to full domination over it. Indeed, they possessed a lively
and sophisticated ethnographical curiosity about the peoples who inhabited the lands beyond the frontiers of the empire. It meant that, for the
Romans, the peoples of these other worlds, the Syrians, for instance, or
the Chinese, had no separate identity as communitiesmuch less as political powersas the Romans conceived such things. When, in the second
century, the Emperor Antonius Pius was addressed as Lord of all the
World (dominus totius orbis), this merely gave legal expression to longheld Roman belief that, whether those who lived beyond their borders
recognized it or not, the political realm of Rome and the human genus
had been made one.23
Rome, however, was not only a political realm. It was also the embodiment of the Stoic belief in the possibility of a single law for all humanity. If
the Greeks gave Europe the philosophy and the mathematics that made
possible its subsequent scientific development, the Romans gave it its legislative habits. Although the concept of Europeans as law-governed peoples originated in Greece, it was the Romans who elevated the law to
the place it still holds todayas the sole guarantor of the continuity of
civilization, however we choose to define that emotive term. Much of
this was swept away during the Gothic invasions that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the outer fringes of the empire, Germanic
customary law came to replace Roman law. But despite these changes,
that law remained, and remains, the single most unifying feature of the
20
21
23
Lectures on Law: XI Citizens and Aliens, published in 17901, can be found in

The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1967), 2 vols., II, 581.
22 Virgil, Aeneid, 1, 2867.
Horace, Odes, IV.3, 13.
Digest XIV, 2.9. See Claude Nicolet, LInventaire du monde: Geographie et politique aux
origines de lempire romain (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 28.
43
continent. Edmund Burke, good European that he was, offered an image

of a world of independent states united as a common culture, based upon
the old Gothic customary [law]. . . digested into system and disciplined
by the Roman law, in every part of which it would be possible for a
European to feel at home.24 For this reason the creation of a single legislative order for the whole of Europe remained an ambition of the most
powerful of Europes rulers from the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, through Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV to Napoleon. In somewhat
muted form, this ambition is held by the European Court of Justice today.
After the triumph of Christianity, ancient Greek and Roman notions of exclusivity were further enforced by Christians insistence upon the uniqueness both of the Gospels and of the Church as a source of moral and
scientific authority. Custom, in Lactantiuss words, had been made congruent with religion. Christianity was thought of as spatially coextensive
with the Roman Empire. The world, the orbis terrarum, thus became, in
terms of the translation effected by Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century,
the orbis Christianus or, as it would be called in the European vernaculars, Christendom. As late as 1761, such a relatively hostile witness
as Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceded that Europe, even now, is indebted
more to Christianity than to any other influence for the union . . . which
survives among her members.25 It was a union he frequently abhorred
but from which he could never quite escape.
The scattered, diverse, and plural cultures of the ancient world that
constitute what we now call Europe shared, therefore, a single identity as
so many places of human flourishing bound together by a common system of law. When they gradually converted to Christianity, they acquired a
common religion and a common cult. They also shared a language: Latin.
Although, after the fourth century, Roman institutions, Roman architecture, and Roman literature gradually lost their power to unite Europe in
a common culture, and the concept of a single body of citizens vanished
altogether, Latin survived as the language of the Church and the learned
elites of Europe until well into the eighteenth century. As the Italian
Republican Carlo Cattaneo noted in 1835, Europe possessed four unifying
24
25
Edmund Burke, Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament on the
Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France [hereafter, Letters on the
Regicide Peace], in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford et al.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19811991), IX, 2489.
Ecrits
sur labbe de Saint Pierre, in Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed.
Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1964),
III, 566.
44
ANTHONY PAGDEN
features: the power of the former imperial authority, the Roman Law,
Christianity, and the Latin language.26
Latin, however, was almost wholly a written language, and even then it
was largely confined to the clergy and the lay intelligentsia. Few could, or
did, actually speak it. Even the professoriat, who were bound by statute in
most of the universities of early-modern Europe to deliver their lectures in
Latin, spoke for the most part in a curious hybrid version of the language
and when excited frequently lapsed for long periods into the vernacular.
Diplomatic Latin became restricted after the 1520s to polite formulae,
and writers on the increasingly important science of diplomacy, such as
Ottaviano Maggi, stressed the need for living languagesalthough in his
De Legato of 1566 he did so in Latin. Most of educated Europe before
the eighteenth century was multilingual. Rulers, such as the Holy Roman
Emperors, governed peoples speaking a bewildering number of languages.
Charles V was said to have spoken Spanish to God, French to his mistress,
and German to his horse. Many European languagesBreton, Provencal,
Arrogance, Walloon, Piedmonteseare now minority tongues that have
long been made subservient to a national vernacular. But throughout most
of the early-modern period, these were the dominant and in some cases
the official languages of the regions in which they were spoken. Making
oneself understood as one passed from one territory to another was of
crucial importance.
Since few could hope to speak all the major languages of Europe, most
educated Europeans shared the conviction that there should exist a spoken
tongue that, if not as universal as Latin had once been, should be widely
understood. In the sixteenth century this became Italian, the language in
which Dante, two centuries before had, in a self-conscious break with
tradition, decided to write his great poem. Italian was the language of
literature and as such as familiar to the learned elite as English is today.
Michael de Montaigne learned Italian, although his father had brought
him up in an entirely Latin-speaking household, and when he crossed the
Alps, he changed the language of his journal from French to Italian. On
returning through the Mon Cernis pass, he noted, in French, here French
is spoken, so I leave this foreign language in which I feel competent but
ill-grounded.27 By the late seventeenth century, because of Louis XIVs
effective political domination of mainland Europe, French had become
the language of diplomacy and the courts, and the language in which
26
27
Carlo Cattaneo, Sulle Interdizioni israelitiche, ed. G. A. Belloni (Rome: Sestante, 1944),
568.
Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 162.
45
educated Germans, such as Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote when they

were not still writing in Latin or, in Leibnizs case struggling to devise a
universal system of characters capable of expressing all our thoughts
be we Frenchmen or Assyrians.28 And French remained dominant until
the end of the eighteenth century.
Despite the religious, cultural, and linguistic unity they had given to the
continent, neither the Roman Empire, nor Christendom was, of course,
identical with Europe. Much of the Roman Empire lay in Asia and
in North Africa. Christianity had begun as an Asian religion, and the
first Christian churches had been established on the North African littoral. After the fall of Rome, however, and the subsequent attempt under
Charlemagne to rebuild the empire in the West, the notion of the world
shrank until it covered little more than what is today continental Europe.
Charlemagne,althoughfrequently claimingsomekind of world sovereignty,
called himself pater europaethe father of the Europeans. The Emperor
Charles V, who in the early sixteenth century came closer than any ruler
before or since to uniting Europe under one sovereign, was addressed as
totius europae dominuslord of all European obvious allusion to
Antoninus Piuss claim to be dominus totius orbis.
For all this self-confidence, however, Europe was, and always had
been, a highly unstable term. No one has ever been certain quite where
its frontiers lie. Only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean provide obvious
natural boundaries. For the Greeks, Europe had sometimes been only
the area in which the Greeks lived, a vaguely defined region that shaded
into what was once Yugoslavia in the North and is still Turkey in the
South. For most, however, Europe had a larger, more indeterminate geographical significance. It was seen as the lands in the West, whose outer
limits, the point at which they met the all-encircling Okeanos, were still
unknown. Beyond Europe lay Asia and Africa. Africa, South of the Atlas
mountains, was dark and unimaginable and remained so, despite the
Portuguese exploration and settlement of large areas of the western shores,
until the nineteenth century. Only the North coast, which had once been
part of the Roman Empire and from the fifteenth century was the home
of Barbary pirates and the focus of disastrous crusading ambitions by the
Portuguese and the Spaniards, was terra cognita. North Africa, however,
was a frontier region where Berber states and Ottoman client rulers posed
a constant threat to the settled places of Christendom until the extinction
28
Leibniz, quoted in Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 100.
46
ANTHONY PAGDEN
of Turkish hegemony in the Mediterranean in the late seventeenth century.

All along the southern coast of Italy and Spain were strings of fortifications to guard local populations against the continual threat of Islamic
incursions. These might be brief, but they could also be deadly. When in
1544 Francis I of France allowed the Turkish fleet to winter at Toulon, he
was not merely giving assistance to the enemies of Christ (and, more to
the point, of the Emperor Charles V). He was dissolving a centuries-old
antagonism. He was allowing Asia into Europe.
If Europes southern frontiers were in this way indeterminate, her eastern ones were forever undecided. Poised between eastern Europe and the
recognizable Orient was the unsettling presence of Russia. Russia, sometimes friend, more frequently foe, threw into stark relief the fact that
Europe was a culture, a shared way of life, rather than a place. Russia
had many of the features of a European society, and it was undeniably
Christian. Yet because of its vast size and the fact that so much of it had
been ruled for so long by nomadic peoples who were clearly not European,
it lay beyond the formal limits of Romanized civilization. While it remained, in this way, stubbornly an oriental despotism, Russia rested firmly
within Asia, the backward barbaric empire of the steppes. But once, in
the eighteenth century, its rulers took to wearing silk brocade and conversing in French, it became inescapably Europeanized. In their ambition
to subjugate Europe, the Russians, Rousseau declared, had themselves
been subjugated. Peter the Great, the first of the Czars to modernize,
which meant Europeanize, the Russian Empire, was described by
Montesquieu as having given the manners of Europe to a European
power.29 His successor, the Empress Catherine the Great, declared at the
beginning of the reforming constitutional code she had devised (the Nakaz)
that Russia is a European Power.30 (Catherine, however, was German
born and French educated and Russian only by marriage.) But if the
Russia of Peter and Catherine was in, as far as the rest of Europe was
concerned, it was only partially so. Frederick the Great of Prussia was
not alone in denying the empire of the Czars any lasting place among
what he described significantly as the civilized nations of Europe.31
When seen in this way from the heartlands of Europe, Russia could appear distinctly other. When set, however, against the image of the true
29
30
31
Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, XIX, 14.

Denis Diderot, Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies
for the Making of the Laws, in Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason
and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85.
Quoted in Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 2d ed. (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1968), 125.
47
Orient, she appeared, if only fleetingly, European. When William Pitt,

during the Ochakov crisis of 1791, proposed sending British troops to
help the Sultan resist the Czar, Edmund Burke responded angrily: What
have these worse than savages to do with the powers of Europe, but
to spread war, devastation and pestilence among them? Russia, if only
briefly, had thus joined the powers of Europe.32
Because of this ambivalence, which survives to this day, the official
frontier to the East, always a faintly absurd notion, was forever on the
move. At the end of the fifteenth century it advanced steadily from the
Don, where it had been fixed for a thousand years, to the banks of
the Volga; by the late sixteenth century it had reached the Ob; by the
nineteenth, the Ural and the Ural mountains. In the twentieth it finally
came to rest on the banks of the river Emba and the Kerch.33 Despite
this juggling with geography and the literalness with which geographers
from Fra Mauro in the 1450s to the All-Union Geographical Society in the
1950s have treated what is, in fact, a cultural frontier, despite Catherines
efforts and the absorption in the nineteenth century of the Romanovs into
the families of the crowned-heads of Europe, Russia has always been incorporated into Europe imperfectly. After the creation of the Soviet Union,
that tenuous sense of similarity vanished once again, and communism
rapidly became for many Europeans, in particular those close to the Soviet
borders, yet another manifestation of the Oriental other. Today things
are beginning to change, if only gradually. East-German politicians, such
as Lothar De Maizière, conceive of a common European house that will
supersede the old divisions so that a greater Europe from the Atlantic
to the Urals [will] again takes shape.34 But the Germans feel a special
responsibility toward the rest of East Central Europe. Europeans from
farther West remain diffident and suspicious. Eastern Europes uncomfortable proximity to Asia and its linguistic and religious separateness (made
the most striking in the Russian case by the use of the Cyrillic alphabet)
reinforce the belief that the East belongs on the far side of some unmarked
but clearly perceptible frontier.
If European society was, and remains, one broadly committed to a life
of civility, it is also one in which identity has been closely associated
32
33
34
Quoted in Jennifer Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the Crusade against the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan,
1995), 78.
See W. H. Parker, Europe: How Far? in The Geographical Journal 126 (1960): 27897.
De Maizière quoted by Risse and Engelmann-Martin in chapter 13.
48
ANTHONY PAGDEN
with ownership. Citizenship in Europe has long been restricted to property owners. (Until very recently jury service in Britainthe obligation
of the citizen to participate in the judiciary processwas restricted to
house owners.) Even the French Revolution could be conceived by some,
Tocqueville and Taine among others, as the product rather than the source
of modern property relations.35 The right to property could be established
in a number of ways: by autochthony, by inheritance, by purchase, or by
what in Roman law was called prescriptionthat is, prolonged and unchallenged possession. But the question for most early-modern theorists
was how to establish property rights as a feature not only of the civil law,
but also of the law of nature. One of the basic claims of the latter was that
all humankind had been granted an equal share in the earth. Inequality
was a feature of the divisions of the races of the world into different peoples and thereafter of the creation of political societies. How then had the
first men acquired the right to divide up Gods earth among themselves?
The answer to this question, which still plays a significant role in the
European definitions of land rights, drew on the Greek conception of the
potentiality of nature.
In a celebrated passage in the Second Treatise on Government, John
Locke argued that mankind had acquired possession of the earth by laying out something upon it that was his own, his labour. So that he
thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another
had not Title, nor could without injury take from him.36 It was thus
mans labourprecisely, that is, his techne (skills)that established
his right to secure for his personal use alone a portion of what was significantly called Adams plenty. In Emeric de Vattels Le Droit des gens,
ou principes de la loi naturelle appliques a` la conduite et aux affaires des
nations et des souverains of 1758, which became a textbook on the natural
law in the late eighteenth century, the disposition to acquire property in
this way is turned into a definition of what it is to be humanthe imposition, in Hegels understanding, of the subjective will on the objective
world of nature. The cultivation of the soil, wrote Vattel,
is an obligation imposed upon man by nature [emphasis added]. Every nation
is therefore bound by natural law to cultivate the land which has fallen to its
share. . . . Those peoples such as the Ancient Germans and certain modern Tartars
who, though dwelling in fertile countries, disdain the cultivation of the soil and
35
36
Donald R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1984), 126.
Lockes Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 309.
49
prefer to live by plunder, fail in their duty to themselves, injuring their neighbours
and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey.37
As Talal Asad observes in this volume, European history becomes a

history of continuously productive actions defining as well as defined by
Law.
Men were thus encouraged to see in the natural world a design of which
they were the final beneficiaries. Art itself, as the eighteenth-century
Scottish social theorist Adam Ferguson was later to observe, is natural
to man. . . . [H]e is destined from the first age of his being to invent and to
contrive.38 But not precisely all men. The European sense of superiority,
of having been singled out, first by nature, then by God, to play a special
role in the history of creation, derived from the conviction that only those
who dwelt in the kind of law-governed free urban communities of which
Europe was constituted would ever be likely to possess the capacity to
harness nature to their purposes. The others, the barbarians, ground
down by the demands of their rulers and thwarted in every attempt to
express their individual selves, remained forever in unenlightened herds.
In Europe the arts were, in the full sense of the term, liberal. And if these,
too, had begun in Asia, in Babylon and Egypt, it was only in Europe that
their potential had been realized. The liberal arts, wrote a complacent
Samuel Purchas, are more liberal to us, having long since forsaken their
seminaries in Asia and Africa.39
It is this, too, which led to the assumption that science would always be
superior to simple force. In Herodotuss view it had been their skills, their
techne, which had allowed the vastly outnumbered Spartans to defeat the
Persians.40 Generations of later Christian apologists represented the Turks
as an enslaved, archetypical Asian, people, descendants of the Scythians,
who had been denied not merely freedom of action by their rulers, but
also all access to knowledge.41 Their military success, like those of the
Persians before them, had been due in part to their ferocity and in part
to the weakness and intellectual poverty of their opponents. Throughout the sixteenth century, when successive Christian intellectuals called
37
38
39
40
41
a` la conduite et aux
Le Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle appliques
affaires des nations et des souverains [1758], ed. James Brown Scott (Washington:
Carnegie Foundation, 1916), 3 vols., III, 378.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12.
Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, I, 17.
Herodotus, Histories, IX, 61.
See James Hankins, Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of
Mehmed II, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995): 111207.
50
ANTHONY PAGDEN
upon their rulers to bury their differences and mount a crusade against
the Turk, the claim was always that European, Christian, science could
never fail against Asian ignorance. And when, beginning in the thirteenth
century, Europeans set out to persuade the world of the truth of their
religion, they assumed a self-evident association between knowledge and
belief. The European capacity to span an open space using an arch was
said to have instantly persuaded one Peruvian chieftain of the truth of
Christianity. The Jesuits who traveled to China in the late sixteenth century took with them clocks, astrolabes, telescopes, clavichords, Venetian
prisms, and suction pumps. If, the argument went, the European God had
taught the Europeans how to devise such ingenious things, the European
God must be the true one. The Chinese, however, had other conceptions of
the necessary relationship between technology and religious belief. While
grateful for the clocks, they declined the offer of the Gospel. This refusal
to accept the obvious led the most famous of the Jesuits, Matteo Ricci, to
declare that they have no logic and the Chinese to accuse the missionaries of indulging in countless incomprehensible lines of reasoning.42
After Columbuss discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape
of Good Hope (famously declared by Adam Smith to be the two greatest
and most important events recorded in the history of mankind),43 the
European belief in the capacity of European science to dominate the world
became even more assertive. Both these oceanic journeys had been made
possible by the use of the compass and the skill of European navigators and
cartographers. Only those whom Purchas described as we in the West
had been able to achieve such triumphs. Asians and Africans had been
capable of limited navigational feats. But only the Europeans had managed to cross oceans, to settle and to colonize. Only the Europeans had
civilized peoples from distant and inferior worlds. In a famous engraving by Johannes Stradanus of 1589, Amerigo Vespucci is shown drawing
aside a curtain to reveal the America whom he will have named, and
thus in some sense created. In this image of the first moment of contact,
Vespucci is represented with an astrolabe, the symbol of his empowering knowledge in his hand. America, in recumbent allusion to Vespuccis
own image of the continent as an ever-available female, is raising herself
half-naked from the long sleep of her ignorance.
42
43
Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2423.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976),
2 vols., II, 626.
51
From the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century images of the
four continents appeared in the most unlikely places. They were reminders
both of the newly acquired vision of a vastly enlarged world and of
Europes triumph over so much of it, a triumph that only the sciences and
the arts had made possible. Take one striking but representative example. On the ceiling of the stairway hall of the Trappenhaus, the residence
of the Prince-Bishops of Wurzburg, a princely family in no way associated with transoceanic navigation, the great eighteenth-century Venetian
artist Giambattista Tiepolo depicted in lavish detail each of the four continents. They are so arranged that no matter where the viewer stands,
Asia, Africa, and America can only be seen in relation to Europe. The
allegorical figure of Asia is shown seated on an elephant, Africa on a
camel, and America on a crocodilemenacing, languid, and amphibious.
Only Europe sits on a throne instead of an animal, and only Europe is
surrounded, not by the natural produce of the continent she represents,
but by what its peoples have created, by the attributes of the arts, of music
and painting, the sciences, and the technology of warfare. Furthermore,
Europe is the point from which all the other figures must be viewed. As
Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall wrote, to look at Europe one
should look from Europe for Asia, Africa and America are depicted in
their relation to Europe. Europe is the rubric, the initial code.44 This is
why in Cesare Ripas Iconologia of 1603, a work that provided artists with
a easy set of iconographic rules, readers were instructed to depict
Europe wearing a crown to show that Europe has always been the
leader and queen of the whole.45 Thus an abducted Asian princess had
become, as she appears in Sebastian Munsters

Cosmographia of 1588, a
Queen.
The shrinking of the frontiers in this way gradually forced upon the
European consciousness a greater sense of the boundaries that lay between them and the rest of the world. But this did not, except for the
very few, result in any greater sense that the assumed superiority of the
continent over all others might be unwarranted. Montaignes skepticism
which drew some of its inspiration from his awareness of non-European
cultures as well as from the diversity of cultural practices within Europe
led to a form of cultural pluralism. In the hands of the natural law theorists of the seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf in
44
45
Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Imagination
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 154.
` vitij, Afetti; Passione humane, Corpi
Iconologia overo Decrittione dimagini delle virtu,
celesti, Mondo e sue parti (Padua, 1611), 356.
52
ANTHONY PAGDEN
particular, the awareness of the diversity of the world beyond Europe did
much to shatter the idea that that law of nature was more or less identical
with the customs practiced by the peoples of Europe. Even the information that was available by the end of the seventeenth century on such
an advanced and complex civilization as China did little to shake the
belief that, taken as a whole, European civilization was not doing very
much better than any of the available alternatives. To believe otherwise
is to mistake the force of Montaignes irony for approval. Similarly, the
uses to which Voltaire put the Chinese sacred historieswhich seemed
to demonstrate that there were centuries that the biblical narrative of the
creation could not account forwere largely directed against the absurd
claims of the Christian Church rather than at the broader cultural worlds
that have always sustained it.
What Burke called the great vicinage of Europe might no longer be
the source of natures laws, but for most Europeans it remained the only
place of true civility, of free men living in secure urban communities under
the rule of law. The rest of humanity served out its days under tyrannies
governed according to the caprice of individual rulers, or in nomadic
or seminomadic groups never far from the primordial state of nature.
By the late seventeenth century this sense of exceptionality had found
expression in a stadial theory of history. In this universal narrative all human societies begin as hunter-gatherers. They then become pastoralists,
less mobile than their predecessors but still, as Montesquieu phrased it,
unable to unite.46 Finally, they invent agriculture, and this in time transforms them into city dwellers and traders, into modern, civilized, social
beings. For all the great social theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centurieswhich in this volume James Tully subjects to such searching
criticismthe final stage (commercial society) represented the highest
possible human attainment on a trajectory through which all the peoples
on the globe were bound to pass. The commercial society was one that
had forsaken ancient violence (or so it was hoped) for benevolent, enlightened communication, for the transaction not only of goods but also of
beliefs, habits, and ideas. The commercial society was one, or so its proponents believed, that could finally dispense with colonization in favor
of harmonious transnational cooperation, one in which the less civilized
peoples of the world would welcome the civilizersnot as conquerors
and despoilers but as intellectual and moral liberators. The peoples of
America, Africa, Asia, and other distant countries seem to be waiting
46
Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, XVIII, 11, Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, II, 537.
53
only to be civilized and to receive from us the means to be so, and find
brothers among the Europeans to become their friends and disciples,
enthused the Marquis de Condorcet in 1793, at the very moment that the
order he was celebrating was about to vanish.47
The ability, whether the consequence of environment or divine will,
to control the resources of the natural world, to make them work for
the greater good of humankind, had given Europe its assumed superiority
among the peoples of the world. This is the origin of the belief, which is still
shared by many, that Europe or The West or The North is somehow
exceptional. As much as we all may regret it, for long periods of its recent
history, the West has exercised technological and political mastery over
much of the rest of the world. Just as the ability to do this derived substantially from a specific set of convictions embedded in particular ways
of lifefrom a specific cultureso the record of those achievements has
served to define that culture.
Europeans are, I suspect, unusual in sharing in this way a sense that it
might be possible to belong to something larger than the family, the tribe,
the community, or the nation yet smaller and more culturally specific than
humanity. If the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, or the Singhalese
now sometimes choose to identify themselves as Asians, this is because
European notions of ethnicity, and the domination of the world economy
by European concepts of exchange, have compelled them to do so. Similarly, the peoples of, say, Uganda and Congothemselves the products of
European impositionsare highly conscious of belonging to a continent
called Africa largely because European colonization, and the marks of
European racism, have obliged them, for motives of economic and political survival, to speak of Africa, from Libya to the Transvaal, as if it were
the bearer of a common cultural identity. Yet being African in Africa or
Asian in Asia provides only the loosest cultural or political cohesion and
at most levels no cohesion at all.
I am not endorsing any kind of European exceptionalism. All the peoples of the world are the outcome of the combination, dispersal, and recombination, through warfare and the pursuit of subsistence, of myriad
diverse groups of peoples. China, which is larger than Europe, was not inhabited by one ethnic group either. Nor was Assyria, Elam, Urartu, Persia,
ancient Mexico, or Inka Peru. But these were ethnic states. They invited
(or compelled) the outsiders whom they conquered into their homelands
47
Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse dun tableau historique des progres de lesprit humain,
ed. Alain Pons (Paris, 1988), 269.
54
ANTHONY PAGDEN
and absorbed them into the dominant ethnic community. What is unusual
about Europe is that it has for long possessed an identity as a cultural
space where there have been and continue to be frequent political unions.
It has never, however, constituted a single state, much less a single ethnic
group.
The modern European Union has, in one sense, changed all that. The
notion that Europe might become not merely a loose association of
communities sharing an indeterminate common culture, but instead a political union of states is hardly new. From the Duc de Sullys Grand Design
of 1620 to the fitful projects, which begin to appear after the 1840s, for
a United States of Europe, there has existed a continuous objective to
create a European federation that would finally put an end to intracontinental warfare and enhance the welfare of all the peoples of the region.
Only since 1945, after what the Spanish writer and statesman Salvador
de Madariaga once described as Europes two great civil wars, has this
project had any chance of being realized.48 Despite the single market and
the single currency, despite ever-increasing convergent political and legal
institutions, the vagaries and uncertainties that once hung over the notion of a single European identity hang there still. Europe will never be
an ethnic community, nor even the mega-state that the opponents of the
Union so fear it might become. But the European Union andshould it
ever come aboutthe United States of Europe will surely come closer
than any political order has ever done before to establishing just what it
means to be a European. When it does it will be the embodiment of a
vision that reaches back nearly three millennia.
48
Portrait of Europe [Bosquejo de Europa] (New York: Roy Publishers, 1955), 23.
2
Some Europes in Their History
J. G. A. POCOCK
I shall try to give some answers to the questions What is Europe? or

rather What do we mean by Europe? The second question implies that
Europe is something we have invented, and there is a habit at present
of putting the words the invention of before the name of anything we
want to discuss. This implies that there is nothing to discuss except the
reasons, very likely discreditable, that have led others to invent whatever
it is and impose their construction upon us, so that the point of discussion
is to liberate ourselves from the construction by subverting the dominant
paradigm, as the bumper stickers urge us to do. This is, of course, a
very healthy skepticism, and I intend to adopt it in this essay. I do, in
fact, perceive that a construction called Europe is being invented and
imposed upon me in language that suggests that I must accept it without
asking too many questions about what exactly it is, and I am very skeptical
about the motives with which this is being done. I like to characterize
myself as a Euroskeptic, in the proper sense of the term; meaning that I
am skeptical, indeed, about the use of Euroskeptic to denote that sort of
person. Why is it being suggested that we cannot be a skeptic about Europe
without being a fanatical opponent? When that sort of thing happens, it
is usually because a word is being used so as to block all critical thought
about it, and we may want to ask who is using it in that way and from
what motives.
Equally, I do not want to suggest that there is nothing to study here
except constructions in the mind, framed with discreditable intentions. I
have no difficulty in accepting Europe as a reality as well as a construction; many things in human history can be both at once. When I set foot
in Europe, I know that I am there and not in America or in some other
place; that is, I am in a certain place, a configuration of land and water,
not just the sum of the maps that have been drawn of it, and I am in a
55
56
J. G. A. P OCOCK
certain complex of human cultures and human histories constructed by

human effort of one sort and another. They have been constructed, however, by so many humans doing and meaning so many different things
that the process of construction becomes a kind of reality and cannot just
be reduced to a limited number of constructions and inventions waiting
for us to come and deconstruct them.
I want, then, to describe ways in which the word Europe has been
usednecessarily by people acting in historyand how those ways have
grown and spread until the word has reached the point of being used
to denote, first, a continent and, second, a civilization. I am skeptical
about both these ways of using it. I hold Europe to be only part of a
continent and only part of a civilization, but the word has been used to
denote, and to bring together, a great many things that are important in
human experience, and it is important to see what these have been and
are. In the last analysis I am conscious that as a New Zealander I am not
a European. I am, therefore, looking at Europe from the outside; I am
not committed to it.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONCEPT OF EUROPE
Let us start with some geography. The word suggests land, and human
beings, of course, are land animals. But for some thousands of years they
have been seafaring animals as well, and if, like me, you come from an
island group situated in the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, you know
that the seas are bigger than the continents, and that what we call the
Planet Earth could just as well be called the Planet Water. It should come
as no surprise, then, that the invention of continents was the work of
humans who had left the land and were looking back at it from the sea.
The original distinction took shape in a saltwater area of very limited
size, with land masses all around it. I refer, of course, to the Aegean Sea,
the part of the Mediterranean that today lies between Greece and Turkey.
The ancient peoples who used that sea and lived around it became aware
of what we call the Bosphorus, the narrow waterway that connects the
Aegean with the larger and, to them, less-known Euxine or Black Sea.
They developed myths and folktales that had the effect of giving the name
Europa to lands lying West of the Bosphorus and the name Asia to
lands lying East of it. At the same distant time, a third name, or rather
a pair of names, appeared to denote another coast and its hinterlands
lying well to the South of the Aegean. One of these, Egypt, was the
Greek Aegean term for the peoples of the Nile valley and its delta, an
57
immensely ancient and literate people who could give their own accounts
of who they were and where they came from. The other word, Africa,
tended to move westward, away from the Egyptians, and adhere to other
coastlandsalso known as Libya, Mauritania, and so onwith which the
Aegean Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact as their ships explored
the Mediterranean basin.
Once we start talking about the movement of words from one coastland
and hinterland to another, we have begun talking about geography and
cartography: the description of configurations of land and water and their
reduction to spoken and written words and image. Over many centuries
perhaps more than twenty from start to finish of the mapping process
the Aegean words Europe, Asia, and Africa moved outward from
the coastlines to which they had originally been applied and traveled
deeper and deeper into the hinterlands behind them until finally they
reached the opposite seacoasts of these hinterlands and became the names
of what were by then called continents. There is a process in the history of
geography by which the word continent comes to denote a landmass of
very great size, possessing a well-defined maritime perimeter, and linked to
other continents either by a single narrow isthmusas Africa is joined to
Asia and the two Americas to one anotheror not at all, as in the cases
of Australia and Antarctica, the two island continents in the southern
hemisphere.
The anomaly in our typology of continentsan anomaly that shows
how Aegean and Mediterranean concepts still dominate our thinking
consists in our persistent habit of listing Europe as one of the seven continents, when it does not comply with the above definition at all precisely.
There is a disjunction between the ancient and medieval practice of distinguishing the parts into which the earth was divided and the modern
postnavigational practice of mapping and listing the continents. The
continent of Europe is a product of the Mediterranean need of a term
to describe the lands West of the Bosphorus. It is also the product of the
exceptionally self-centered and world-dominating outlook developed by
a civilization that took place in those lands. The notion of a continent
was formed in that civilization but does not fit its own self-description as
the continent of Europe.
In the sixteenth century there were in circulation many copies of a
map and image of Europe, the first part of the earth in the form of a
virgin. It was shaped by the rule of the Habsburg family over Spain, the
Netherlands, the German Empire, and Austria, and showed Europe
as a crowned woman, whose head was the Iberian Peninsula and whose
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heart was situated at Prague. Her left arm was the peninsula of Denmark,
and she held a scepter ruling over the Baltic and the North Sea; her right
arm was the peninsula of Italy, with which she grasped the island of Sicily,
as an imperial orb giving power over the Mediterranean. The skirts of her
robe floated freely over vast and indeterminate regions, between the Black
Sea and the Baltic, to which the draftsman affixed such names as Scythia,
Muscovy, and Tartary.
One can see that the mapmakers have been pushing the Baltic as far
East and the Black Sea as far North as they dare, hoping to bring them
close enough to each other to justify the description of Europe as a continent, but it is not possible to link Europe to Asia by a narrow isthmus
with sea on either hand. Europe is not linked to Asia so much as it is
an extension of it, a peninsula or subcontinent like that of India. Even
then there is no huge mountain barrier like that of the Himalaya, separating the peninsula from the rest of the continent that we might call
Eurasia. The skirts of the imperial robe float over an enormous plain in
which there are neither seas nor mountains, nor any natural frontier at
all. Subsequently, there arose the habit of terminating Europe at the Ural
Mountains, which marked no important climactic or cultural or political
characteristics. It is another characteristic of the Habsburg map that it
can touch only the coasts of Scandinavia North of the Baltic, as of Africa
South of the Mediterranean. One might almost say that Scandinavia is a
separate peninsula of the Eurasian continent and that Europe is another.
When Scandinavia came to be considered part of Europe is a historical
question.
The formation of Europe was not quite complete in 1760 when
Voltaire, who though a great historian was not a great scholar, wrote his
History of Russia under Peter the Great. Certainly, he wrote to celebrate
the work of Peter and his successors in bringing Russia into the civilization he thought of as European; but at the same time he is inclined to
include Sweden, Baltic Germany, Poland, and Russia in an area he called
simply the north (le nord) and did not consider fully European. And
what is more, Voltaire remarks that if you situate yourself imaginatively
about the Sea of Azov, just East of the Crimean, you cannot tell where
Europe leaves off and Asia begins. It would probably be better to abandon
both terms, expanding the term le nord into terres boreales or terres arctiques, corresponding (he says) to the terres australes and antarctiques
which we use in speaking of the great continent we believe to exist in
the southern hemisphere. Very soon after Voltaire wrote this, European
navigators in the Pacific dissolved the southern continent into the two
island continents called Australia and Antarctica, perhaps confirming the
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presumption that continents must be situated in the ocean. But we have

not given up the practice of describing Europe as a seventh, or rather as
the first, continent, though we have long known perfectly well that its
eastern aspect does not separate it from Asia but establishes a continental
heartland in which all frontiers, physical or cultural, are essentially indeterminate. This tells us a great deal about the civilization that has grown
up in Europe and calls itself by that name, and we have now to turn
from Europe as a continent to Europe as a civilization.
The word Europa was in use in the Roman empire but was not
used self-descriptively; Rome may have known that it was in Europe but
did not characterize itself as European, since the word was not used that
way. The reason for this was that the Roman empire was not continental
but Mediterranean. It was formed by the hegemony of a central Italian
people over all three of the coastlandsAsian, African, and European
first defined in the ancient Mediterranean and has been carried deep into
the hinterlands behind each: in Asia as far as Armenia and Mesopotamia,
in Africa as far as the cataracts of the Nile and the Sahara, and in Europe
by a series of conquests (first over the Iberian peninsula, then beyond the
Western Alps into Gaul and Britain and the delta of the Rhine, and finally
over a series of provinces along the Danube from modern Switzerland to
modern Romania). The poet Ovid found himself exiled to the shore of
the Black Sea, on the edge of Voltaires le nord, which he thought of as
Scythia, not as Asia. In central Germany the Romans were closer than
they knew to the vast indeterminacy of Eurasia.
Now what we call Europe is a civilization, rather peninsular and
transalpine than Mediterranean in any comprehensive sense, created in
the last group of Roman provinces after the disintegration of a unified
Roman empire. That disintegrationGibbons famous Decline and Fall
came about in stages. The first, most European, and to him for various
reasons the most prominent, was the collapse of Roman control over the
far western provinces, and over Italy itself, which happened when an upheaval originating in nomadic central Eurasia caused German peoples to
move over the Danube and Rhine in greater numbers than the Romans
could absorb. This extinction of the empire in the West was Gibbons
primary theme, both because it happened first and because he was preoccupied, as a European, with the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the papal
church. But it was followed, two centuries later, by an even greater event,
when a religious revolution in the Fertile Crescent led to the Muslim Arab
conquest of most of Roman Asia and all of Roman Africa, from Egypt
West to Spain: the destruction of Mediterranean cultural unity, which has
never quite recovered.
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The conquest produced a double separation of Europe from the

other Mediterranean hinterlands: the western provinces went their own
way, and the empire that survived was based in Constantinople, with
one foot in ancient Asia and the other in ancient Europe, one East and
the other West of the Bosphorus, which had originally separated the two.
Four and then eight centuries later still, Islamicized Turks from Central
Eurasia began and ended the conquest of Arab Asia and Egypt, and of
Byzantine Asia and Europe; the princedom of Muscovy set itself up as
the Third Rome, the heir of Byzantium; and this completed a process by
which the concept of Europe migrated irreversibly to the far western
provinces. As a result, we are no longer quite sure whether the former
Byzantine world (ex-Ottoman or ex-Soviet) belongs in Europe or not,
and the great indeterminacy of Europes eastern borderlands has taken
on a cultural as well as a geographic significance.
The geographical concept of Europe has moved West, to the point
where it defines an Atlantic peninsula by calling it a continent. Similarly,
the historical concept of Europe has migrated, to the point where everything we mean when we say the history of Europe refers to the history of
the political and religious culturethe highly distinctive civilizationthat
arose in the far-western Latin-speaking provinces of the former Roman
empire. This has become what we mean by Europe, and its history is
what we mean by the history of Europe. The lands to which the term
Europa was originally appliedThrace, Macedonia, Illyria, the more
modern Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbiathose which the Byzantine emperors considered their European themes or provincesare in our minds
only marginally European, inhabited by uncouth warring tribes whose
history is not ours and whose problems are none of our business.
We are no doubt very wrong in having this perception, but we do have
it, and it is important to understand how we have acquired it. In the western provinces lost by the Romans to a diversity of German-speaking settlers, two things happened. The Christian Church acquired the formidable
organization of papal authority, and the barbaric kingdoms acquired the
formidable feudalism of heavy-armored horsemen. All this happened a
long way from the sophisticated urban societies of the Greeks, Arabs, and
Iranians, but the consequences have been such that the narrative of history was stolen from them. In his book significantly entitled The Making
of Europe, Robert Bartlett has examined how it happened that this farwestern culturefeudal, papal, monastic, Latinbegan in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries to expand aggressively. It expanded westward at the
expense of Celtic peoples, beyond England into Wales and Ireland;
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eastward at the expense of Slavic and Finno-Ugrian peoples, beyond

Saxony into the heartlands of the European peninsula; and southeastward at the expense of the Byzantine empire and the increasingly Turkdominated Arab Khalifat, in the far less stable and enduring enterprise of
the Crusades. It was the last expansion that led the Greek historian Anna
Comnena to write that all the western barbarians had marched across
Europe to Asia. She also refers to the mainly Frankish and Norman crusaders as Celts, which tells us that she is using what old Greek and
Latin terms she can find to describe far-western phenomena, and that
there is no reason why she should think of herself as either European
or Asian. She is a Roman. It has not yet happened that the new Latin
civilizationto Anna Comnena purely barbariccan claim a monopoly
of the word Europe and a monopoly of history by calling itself by that
name.
The episode of the Crusades did not last. The expansion of Europe
into the Slavic heartlands altered the historical map by creating what we
think of as the problem of Central Europe. Certain Catholic provinces
of Latin culture were createdamong Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Croatsand they share that European history that is the history of the Latin papacy and empire and their aftermath. These peoples
exist in close proximity with other peoplesRussians, Ukrainians, Serbs,
Greeks, and Turkswhose history is not Latin and whom we may think
of as Europeans or not as we choose. The point is that we have to choose
and do not quite know how to choose.
The eastward expansion of the western Latins entered that broad zone
where there is neither a maritime nor a terrestrial frontier permitting us
to say where Europe leaves off and Asia begins. In this zoneonce
known to geopolitical theorists as the Heartland of the World Island
the Latin civilization that came to call itself Europe found itself without any fixed cultural, ecclesiastical, or political frontiers either. To the
Southeast, the lands originally called Europe passed increasingly from
Greek Orthodox to Turkish Muslim control, culminating in the temporary Ottoman conquest of Catholic-Protestant Hungary in 1526. In the
indefinitely extensible heartlands between the Baltic and the Black Sea,
the contact between Latins and Greeks was overwhelmed in the thirteenth century by Mongol power, which deeply affected the history we
call Russian and left Poland and Lithuania vulnerable to Crimean slaveraiders well into the seventeenth century.
Is all this history European or not? It depends on what we want to
say, and on whether we want to decide what we want to say. History since
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1989 suggests that wewhoever we arewould rather not have to

decide. Is this the product of a prudent awareness that Europe has no
frontiers in the East or of some deeper weakness of will?
THE ENLIGHTENED NARRATIVE
I now return to the history we all know, more or less, and describe as
the history of Europe. When did it begin to be said that Europe
had a history, and when did it begin to be implied that all history was
the history of Europe? A good answerthough like all good answers an
oversimplificationcan be given by fastening on the great historians of the
eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment: on Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume,
Robertson, and the extraordinary partnership of Raynal and Diderot. They
were the ones who set about defining Europe as a secular civilization
and supplying it with a secular history and an age of modernity.
Writing history for them was a weapon against the Church, Protestant
as well as Catholic, and in consequence they wrote a history of the Church
designed to reduce it to secular history. The weakness of the Roman empire, for them, had coincided with the rise of the Church, and there was
a polemic against the history of Greek philosophy, because the Christian
theology that gave the Church authority had been shaped in the old Greek
East, in Alexandria and Antioch and Constantinople. Islam, which the
Enlightened historians rather admired, had progressively destroyed that
Greek world. But in the far western provinces lost to the Franks, Saxons,
and Normans, a new Latin theology had arisen, designed to buttress the
universal jurisdiction of the Pope and to make the Latin church the greatest enemy ever faced by the authority of human society over itself. Gibbon
wrote that the beginnings of modern history should be sought in the eighth
century A.D., when the papacy allied itself with the Frankish kingdom that
became the empire of Charlemagne. Notice that he is using modern to
mean not ancient (and therefore Christian). He has not reached the
point of using it to mean not medieval (and therefore no longer wholly
Christian). For all of these historians there had followed a long struggle
between the empire and the papacy, each created by the other. A climax
occurred about 1300, when the papacy called in the French Angevins
to defeat the Hohenstaufen in Italy, and the French kings defeated Pope
Boniface VIII and removed the papacy from Rome to Avignon. History
as seen by French scholars and publicists now removed its center from
the Church Universal to the kingdom of France, not universal but
hegemonic.
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This was a history of feudal as well as clerical power. The Crusades

figured as the ultimate lunacy of both. It was, of course, a wholly Latin
history dominated by an obsession with the Pope. Greek Orthodox history,
which we might want to call European on the grounds that it continued Christian and Roman history in a non-Latin way, was excluded from
it once the Byzantines were driven out of Italy. Gibbon declared that he
could find nothing in Byzantine history except its fall that deserved more
than a summary and that it was better to study the far more dynamic
peoplesLatins and Normans in the West, Arabs and Turks in the East,
Bulgars and Russians in the Northwho had supplanted it. Latin history
contained its own dynamic. Its external enemies remained external, and
even its critical expansions into Spain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Central
Europe remained peripheral to the struggle between church and civil
society, which had happened nowhere else. Here is the germ of the idea
that history happens only in Europe, while other peoples never change.
The Enlightened narrative proceeded to the late fifteenth century, when
Europe could be said to have become modern in the sense of not
medieval. It began emerging from the feudal and clerical, barbaric and
religious, culture that has enveloped it ever since Charlemagne, or since
Constantine. This was partly a result of the recovery of pre-Christian classicial culturefor which, significantly, Europe was supposed to have
been indebted to the fall of Constantinople and the extinction of Byzantine
civilization. But also it was the result of a series of technological innovationsgunpowder, the compass, and the printing pressunknown to
the ancients. We associate these with the discovery of the New World,
but for Voltaire and Hume and Robertson, they had a prior importance
their role in the creation of powerful military monarchies controlling their
own resources, pursuing their own policies, and capable of acting independently of the papal Church. Once there were several of these monarchies, Europe could be said to have endowed itself with a states-system,
whose raison detat and jus gentium took the place of the political theology
of empire and papacy, and this states-system, or system of international
relations, began to become the definition of Europe itself.
The great Edinburgh historian William Robertson wrote of Europe
as an entity that had pre-existed the Romans, been half-destroyed and yet
half-civilized by Roman conquest, flung into barbarism half-redeemed
by religion when the Roman empire collapsed, and a millennium later
emerged into conditions under which a civilized religion could again exist.
All these were events in the history of Europe. Their culmination
occurred, for Robertson, with the empire of Charles V, which seemed to
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threaten Europe with a new universal empire but, in fact, ushered in the
age of reason of state, when the French monarchy, resisting the Habsburg
dynasty, and the English monarchy, adapting itself to this struggle, began
educating Europe in the conduct of secular power. The balance of power
was Europe, and Europe was the balance of power. It was Spanish
and French, English and Burgundian, German within the structure of
the Holy Roman Empire. It was seldom Polish and never really Central
European at all. Its energies were turned inward on the problems of Latin
civilization, and the explosion of that civilization into Mexico and Peru
belonged, said Robertson, in a history that would have to be written
separately.
In 1780, in their great Philosophical and Political History of the Two
Indies, Raynal and Diderot had already begun to write the history of the
Europeans conquest: first, of the planetary ocean, which had brought
them in contact with all the cultures in the world simultaneously, and,
second, of the two American continents, which was leading to the creation of European societies existing beyond Europe. The discovery of
America, said Hume, marked the true beginning of modern history.
Robertson, however, confined his history to the first half of the sixteenth
century and did not continue it through the seventeenth. Unlike Voltaire
and Hume, he chose to avoid the Wars of Religion. The Enlightened mind
saw Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anabaptism as the reverse side of the
medal to the papacy they sought to destroy: religious fanaticism threatening civil authority in a new way. Voltaire and Hume did not see the
Wars of Religion as ending at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; they were
preoccupied with their after-effects, the Wars of the Fronde in France, the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British islands.
These wars carried the story into Voltaires Age of Louis XIV, the first
and most central of his historical writings. Voltaire saw Europe emerging from the last phase of religious fanaticism into an age of Enlightened
sociability fostered by both courtly monarchy and commercial refinement.
A peripheral debate was carried on by those who held that Louis XIV
had threatened Europe with another universal empire like that of the
Romans. In their view the states-system constituting Europe was achieved
only when his adversaries brought him to terms (or he them) at the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. French and Scottish historians could agree that
Utrecht had achieved a Europe that had outgrown barbarism, fanaticism, and conquest. It was a republic or confederation of states held
together by treaties to which wars were merely auxiliary, and by a common
system of civilized manners communicated everywhere by commerce; a
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European economic community, in fact, but one composed of states whose

sovereignty was the precondition of their capacity for commerce.
This was the Europethe civilization of states, commerce, and
mannersthat we so misleadingly call the ancien regime (it was totally
and self-consciously modern) and that Edmund Burke, writing in the
1790s, declared had been destroyed by two disastrously regressive events:
the French Revolution and the partition of Poland. The first occurred at
the very heart of Enlightened Europe. What was disastrous about it
was that it had restored the climate of fanaticism and returned Europe
to its climate during the Wars of Religion, with ideology taking the place
of theology. The second event occurred nearer the periphery, in what we
have been calling Central Europe. To understand its meaning to Burke,
it may help to recall that the great Enlightened histories were mostly
written just before, during, or just after the Seven Years War (the French
and Indian War) of 175663. This war enlarged a European war into
a global struggle and in the process modified the concept of Europe
itself. The system founded on the Treaty of Utrecht was in essence an
Anglo-French Consortium, with Spain, the Netherlands, and Austriandominated Germany and north Italy as auxiliaries. The Seven Years War,
however, transformed this system in two ways. West of the Atlantic, a
struggle for empire in North America and the Caribbean became so farreaching that the historians Raynal and Diderot could propose that wars
for power in Europe were now dominated by wars for oceanic commerce
and empire. They set out to write the first history of the world-system
created by European conquest of the ocean, arguing that Europeans
were still barbarians who had not fully escaped from the Middle Ages
and asking whether even an Enlightened system of global free trade could
improve them. This is the first history that tries to view Europe in its
global setting, but it is still the maritime far-west of the peninsula they
are looking at. France, they declare, is at the center of Europe because
it lies between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They probably mean
that Europe has been defined by France.
East of, let us say, the river Elbe, the other face of the Seven Years
War enlarged the limited warfare of the system founded on Utrecht into
a struggle between three military empires: the Austrian, the Prussian, and
the Russian. The Central European space in which their war went on
merged into the vaster space in which Europe and Asia can no longer
be told apartVoltaires le nord, created by such far-reaching processes as
the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of the Russian
state by Peter the Great and his successors. Voltaires history of Russia,
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which I quoted earlier, is the major response of Enlightened historiography

to all this. He sees Peter as creating a European state, fit to take part
in the treaties and commerce of Europe. Voltaire even imagines that
contacts between Russia and the Ching emperors will induce China to
take part in this system. He believes that Russia and China between them
will domesticate the Central Asian steppe and end that phase in world
history when Huns or Mongols might dominate or destroy the settled
civilizations around them. This is to imagine Europe as tomorrow the
world. Voltaire is enraged by Rousseaus insistence that Peter did too
much damage to the customs of his subjects, so that sooner or later the
Europeanized Russian state will collapse and the Tartars will return to
Europe. But if the far western imagination did not travel all the way
to China and Kamschatka, it might stop on its own doorstep. Gibbon,
having carried his history to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, could,
in principle, have gone on to the greatness and decline of the Ottoman
Empire and the politics of its Austrian and Russian successors. But there
is no Enlightened history of Central and Eastern Europe, none that offers
to explain the partition of Poland. Gibbon chose instead to return to his
starting point amid the ruins of the Capitol and write three chapters on the
city of Rome under the popes as far as the Renaissance. The imagination
of Catholic-Protestant-Enlightened Europe always came home to its
deeply critical concern with itself.
Enlightened Europethe states-system of the Treaty of Utrechthas
been principally a set of political and cultural arrangements imposed by
the maritime states of the Atlantic coastlands. It was brought to an end
if we follow Burkes analysisby two series of events. The first was the
revolution in the maritime states themselvesFrance, the Netherlands,
perhaps Ireland, but never Britainand in their extensions beyond the
Atlantic to English, French, and Spanish America, a world that Burkes
Annual Register (a journal that he edited) included under the heading
History of Europe, but which Raynal and Diderot showed was hard
to fit into European notions of history. The second event was the growth
of military empires in the great spaces where Europe shades into Eurasia,
which, by partitioning Poland, indicated their power to redefine the statessystem that Europe recognized as part of itself but that existed in a
world western Europeans found very hard to recognize or understand.
In his book Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the
Mind of the Enlightenment, Larry Wolff describes how eighteenth-century
Europeans, as they traveled beyond Germany into Catholic Poland,
Orthodox Russia, and the still Ottoman Balkan Peninsula, felt themselves
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to have quite suddenly entered an alien and archaic world of vast distances, enserfed peasantries, and brutal petty officialsa world that corresponded all too easily to their received notions of oriental despotism.
This last concept was not exclusively an invention of maritime imperialism, though of course it was that. It also reflects the encounter of Europe
on its open eastern frontier with forms of government derived from the
Ottoman or Mongol empire or shaped by these empires as they withdrew;
it was a problem for the British in India whether they were going to join
the family of military empires or attempt something different. The indeterminacy of Europe in the East, however, may help explain the rather
strange way in which Larry Wolffs pages are pervaded by the notion
that western Europeans ought not to have evaluated central and eastern
Europe as they did, that it is not for Europeans to decide who is
European and who is not. This reflects the deeply confused way in
which we now think about cultural identity, but it also reflects the fact
that the decision is difficult to make or to avoid. Should we say that the
affairs of former Yugoslavia ought to be arranged by Europe because
they are part of it? Or should we say that this area is a barbaric frontier
(or rather a collision of archaic frontiers in a world still barbaric), which
it is better to avoid trying to control? Should an empire seek to assimilate
its barbarians or to exclude them? If we reply that it should not have
defined them as barbarians in the first place, the question arises of the
terms in which it ought to have understood them. The lands originally
called Europa are those in which Europe experiences a continuing
problem in defining itself.
ANOTHER EUROPE IN HISTORY
But this is to anticipate the history of Europe since the end of the
Enlightened settlement. That was succeeded by the transitory if spectacular Napoleonic interlude, when the revolutionary empire of France over
Latin Europe proved itself very nearly capable of dominating the three
military monarchies of Europes eastward expansion. The resistance of
Austria, Russia, and the maritime empire of Britain over the Atlantic and
Mediterranean led the French empire to overreach itself, collapse, and be
succeeded by an attempt to restore that Europe of several states linked
by treaty and trade in which Enlightened thinkers had seen the security of
civilization. But this Concert of Europe, heir to the early-modern statessystem, had to be guaranteed by, and therefore had to include, the eastward military monarchies themselves: Prussia, Austria, Russia (but not
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the Turkish empire, seen as barbaric, oriental, decadent, and on the

way to relegation to the colonial world over which Europe ruled). The
technology of industrialism transformed the old empires and republics
into formidably unified military states capable of conscripting their entirely willing citizenries into great national armies. An era of great states,
great wars, and great revolutions can be said to have lasted, rather neatly,
from 1789 to 1989, and the United States and Japan to have played their
parts in it. In the history of Europe, we take as cardinal the two world
wars of the twentieth century in which the German empire-state twice
proved that it could simultaneously threaten to dominate the Netherlands
(thus provoking war with France and Britain on the ancient battlegrounds
of historic Europe) and Poland and Ukraine (thus provoking war with
Russia about that great debatable land that geopoliticians used to proclaim the Heartland, declaring that whoever ruled it ruled the world).
Both the world wars were so destructive to Europe that they produced
huge systemic collapses and the intervention of the continental superstates created by European settlements beyond Europe: the United
States of America and the Eurasian empire of Russia. After 1945, and
for the greater part of my adult lifetime, it was a commonplace among
the most trendy historians to say that the European age had ended, and
Europe itself had been partitioned by the intercontinental superpowers.
This prediction has been falsified, and something calling itself Europe
has emerged and claimed a dominant role.
The European Economic Community, then the European Community,
and then the Unionthe names by which it has progressively called
itselfseems to display a series of characteristics. First, it has remained a
Franco-German consortium, a series of arrangements designed to ensure
that France and Germany will not again go to war by inducing them to
merge their institutions and economies to a point where this ceases to
be possible. This laudable aim could not be pursued without drawing in
adjacent populations in Italy and the Low Countries, and so forth. The
economic benefits of Germanys industrial recovery, and other countries,
were such that many were willing to join in the enterprise. But the enterprise entailed inducing democracies to give up their sovereigntywhich is
to say their capacity for self-government. The strategy adopted from the
start was described by one Quebec statesman as tempting lobsters into the
lobster pot, inducing them to take the first step, and then revealing to them
that it was irrevocable, so that no way remained but forward. There is no
phrase commoner in the rhetoric of Europeanism than weor you
have no other choice, language reused in the United States when the
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North American Free Trade Agreement was being mooted. When I hear
it said that the separate histories of the Irish or British, French or Spanish,
German or Scandinavian (but not yet Polish or Hungarian and certainly
not, for the foreseeable future, Russian) merge in the history of something
called Europe, which has not been written yet, I wonder what this indeterminacy means, and I think we had better set about writing that history
and seeing how it comes out when we do. There are numerous ways of
writing it, and none will be final.
Second, the institutionalization, and the creation of a mystique, that
went with the idea of a union to be called Europe went on in the
era of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the partition of Europe. This
partition, by which the Soviet Union hoped to protect its domination of
the Heartland, and its own unity, ran well west of the indeterminacies
of that region and cut deep into Latin Europe. It separated Lutheran
East Germany from Catholic West Germany, and Catholic Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia from the western Europe of which they might
be considered extensions. In the era of partition, Europe was far from
clear what it intended to do about the central and eastern Europes, apparently lost to Soviet domination. Its ideology was never in practice what
it was in principle: an affirmation of Catholic-Protestant-Enlightened
Europe against the Orthodox-Muslim Europes and Eurasia now
ruled by a semi-Enlightened Russia. Turned westward, the ideology of
Europe became the instrument of a dispute with its other protector:
France and Germany, the losers in the Second World War, against the
United States as the principal victor, and also against Britain while that
state continued to belong to the maritime world of the British Commonwealth and the special relation. A sense of defeat in that set of relationships led the United Kingdom to accede Europe. Since Europe
has not allayed that sense of defeat, the British relationship to it remains
deeply ambivalent. I speak, of course, as a citizen of the former Commonwealth, but I do so without hesitation. Europe must see itself as a new
Norman Conquest, the Channel Tunnel as a revival of the camp at
Boulogne in 1805. The power of the Napoleonic bureaucracies, now serving the international market, seeks to extend itself over the British Isles.
If Europe was a product of the partition of Europe, it has had
to survive the end of that partition and the downfall, not only of the
Soviet Union, but perhaps also of the Russian state created by Peter
and Catherine and their successors. The door is wider open than at any
time in recent history toward those areas where Europe has no frontiers, and any attempt to withdraw them or extend them must be equally
70
J. G. A. P OCOCK
arbitrarytoward the old Heartland where Catholic-ProtestantEnlightened Europe shadesintoOrthodox-Muslim-Communist Eurasia,

and toward the ancient original Europa now known as the Balkan
Peninsula, whose problems are still those created by the expansion and
contraction of the Ottoman Empire. Among the innumerable alarming
features of this situationin which the possible disappearance and the
possible renewal of Russian great-power capacity appear equally
threateningoccurs the thought that Europe may now be what
Germany formerly was: an imperial power secure in the Atlantic coastlands but obliged to attempt imperial control in one or both of the great
marchlands to the East. In times gone by this role entailed great-power rivalries and world wars. Unless a Russian great power revives, these should
not occur again, but the history of European and American dealings with
former Yugoslavia brings to light one more characteristic of contemporary
Europe, of which I want to say something before concluding.
CONCLUSION
We have considered two eras in which Europe was defined as a largely

economic entity and doing so was designed to put an end to periods
of destructive war. The first was the era of Enlightenment from 1713
to 1789, when Europe was presented as a republic of states held together by commerce, succeeding and terminating the Wars of Religion and
the threat of universal monarchy. The second is our own. Whereas the
Enlightened theorists invented Europe as a system of states in which
the partnership of civil sovereignty and civil society was necessary to commerce and the spread of manners, we, apparently, are committed to the
submergence of the state and its sovereignty, not in some pan-European
or universal confederation, but in a postmodern era in which the global
market demands the subjugation of the political community and perhaps
of the ethnic and cultural community also; we are to give up being citizens
and behave exclusively as consumers. This is why the European Union is
ineffective as an empire. An organization designed to break the will of
the state to govern itself necessarily reduces its own will to use military
power to police its own frontiers, notably when these lie in parts of the
world where only will can establish where these frontiers lie. The question for the new century is whether we will retain any capacity to govern
ourselves by political means. Unfortunately, the power to decide on the
use of military force cannot be detached from the retention of the former
capacity as completely as we should like. Europe, the cradle of the state,
may be about to discover what it is like to do without it.
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which the incident at Antioch could be perceived retrospectively as the

turning point that led to the universality of Christianity. His argument
thus left a huge void between the beginning of the Christian era and the
high Middle Ages, a period of a thousand years that is not discussed in
any of the historical parts of Webers work.
Instead, Weber embarked on a comparison of the structural similarities between the constitutional development in Antiquity and the Middle
Ages that in each case led from a domination of patrician families to more
popular regimes (which in most cases, however, were finally led by a new
political elite formed by the merger of an old patriciate with the leading
members of the hitherto underprivileged citizens). These processes led to
the rationalization of the political system by the establishment of magistracies with restricted terms of office and clearly defined competencies, by
the codification of laws, and by rules for the creation of new laws. Webers
comparison relates to the classical ancient city-states (Sparta, Athens,
Republican Rome) and the Italian city-states. It considers inter alia similarities between the Roman plebs and the Italian popolo, who with their
respective representatives (tribuni plebis, capitani del popolo) formed an
alternative political organization that duplicated, in certain respects, the
institutions of the city-government. (Weber also discussed at length the exceptional case of Venice. The Venetian patriciate maintained its political
hegemony for centuries without being seriously challenged by the bulk
of the population.)14 But Weber warns that parallels between political
superstructures may indicate identical economic bases. (It is also worth
mentioning that Webers comparisons always begin with the Middle Ages
and that the medieval examples are described in much more detail than
the ancient ones.) The fundamental difference between the ancient and
the medieval city lay in the relationship between the city and its hinterland. In the ancient world both spheres constituted a political unity that
implied that the peasants made up the majority of citizens. In the Middle
Ages city and hinterland were two legally distinct spheres, and peasants
were not entitled to citizen-rights.
In the last part of Die Stadt Weber returned to the question of
economic rationality in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ideas he had
originally sketched out in the concluding part of Agrarverhaltnisse

im
14
With his comparison of popular magistrates of ancient and Renaissance times and his
allusion to the Myth of Venice, Weber followed a centuries-old tradition of political
thought. See Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and Modern Republicanism: Mixed Constitution and Ephors, in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 626.
Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus
135
Altertum. In Die Stadt he makes the famous distinction between the

ancient homo politicus and the medieval homo oeconomicus:
The specifically medieval city type, the artisan inland city, was altogether economically oriented. . . . Whereas in Antiquity the hoplite army and its training,
and thus military interests, increasingly came to constitute the pivot of all urban
organisation, in the Middle Ages most burgher privileges began with the limitation of the burghers military duties to garrison service. The economic interests
of the medieval townsman lay in peaceful gain through commerce and the trade,
and this was most pronouncedly so for the lower strata of the urban citizenry. . . .
The political situation of the medieval townsman determined his path, which was
that of a homo oeconomicus, whereas in Antiquity the polis preserved during its
heyday its character as the technically most advanced military organisation. The
ancient townsman was a homo politicus.15
For the purpose of this particular comparison, the medieval city
was represented by the type of the artisanal inland city (burgerliche

gewerbliche Binnenstadt) of Europe north of the Alps. These cities were
embedded in a power structure that did not allow them to play an independent military role. Consequently, they did not offer their citizens
opportunities for material gain by military and political means or burden
them with more than a minimum of military service. Therefore, the northern European cities stood in sharp contrast to the ancient city-republics.
The Italian city-states were located between these extremes. The maritime
republics of Venice and Genoa were closer to the ancient example; some
of the Italian inland city-states also displayed some of the features of the
ancient ones because of their ability to pursue expansionist policies. But
the bulk of the citizenry (largely craftsmen) was like its northern European counterpart, overwhelmingly interested in economic policies that
promoted its commercial interests.
In Antiquity the typically declassed citizen was a dispossessed farmer.
In the Middle Ages he was an unemployed craftsman. This difference determined the different character of the class struggle in the two societies,
as well as the direction of the cities economic policy, which only in the
Middle Ages sought to protect the interests of local producers. An ancient
demos (which participated in the gains of an expansionist policy by colonization, booty, grain distributions, soldiers pay, and political reward)
was only concerned about preserving the exclusivity of its status and not
inclined to a peaceful acquisition of wealth through industry and trade.
These warrior guilds, therefore, maintained a closed-shop with respect to citizen status. This implied, especially in the Greek case, an
15
E&S 1353f. = WuG 805.
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W ILFRIED N IPPEL
inability to build up stable empires. Citizens maintained status distinctions against metics (resident aliens), freedmen, and slaves. This meant
that groups such as metics and freedmen were the only ones truly oriented toward the pursuit of peacefully acquired profit through commerce
and trade. There could be no guilds in the proper sense. The creation of
guilds for the first time during the Middle Ages constituted the organization of labor on the basis of formally free contract, which Weber qualified
as the most productive type of labor organization in history. Thus, citizens
are likely to choose economic rationality only if they have no chance to
acquire material gains by military means or, to put it another way, only
if they are no longer occupied by compulsory military functions. That is
why the foundations for rational capitalism could be laid only in the later
Middle Ages and not in Antiquity.
Missing from this thesis are two crucial test casesnamely, the cities
within the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. Weber himself said that in a
unified and pacified Mediterranean world the ancient city became the
centre of exclusively economic interests.16 Therefore, these structures
would have required a more thorough analysis beyond the statement that
the bureaucratic monarchy, and the shift from coastal to continental civilization, dealt a fatal blow to any dynamic economical development. It is
also a pity that Weber did not expand his argument concerning the preconditions of economic rationalization with respect to the later developments
in early-modern Europe. The Netherlandish and English cities could have
served as test cases. Weber stresses the exceptional status of English cities
(apart from London) whose communal rights in the Middle Ages had
always depended on concessions by the crown.
Since he held that the political structures of Antiquity were responsible for the limits of economical rationalization, Weber was unable to
understand fully the essence of ancient politics, especially in those areas
where it distracted the bulk of the citizenry from rationalized economic
production. This comes out most clearly in Webers rather gloomy and
one-sided picture of Athenian democracy. The political participation of
citizens (service in the political institutions and in military campaigns
of proportions which no other differentiated culture in history has ever
experienced before or since) is seen as an impediment to pacific economic acquisition based on rational and continuous economic activity.
The liturgies, a mixture of compulsory duties and volunteer engagements
by which wealthy citizens contributed to the financing of the fleet and of
16
ASAC 358 = SWG 271.
Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus
137
public festivals, are viewed unfavorably by Weber, since in his opinion

they subjected any accumulation of wealth to the utmost instability. The
system of popular courts in which even civil trials were decided by hundreds of lay jurymen implied an arbitrariness of justice that imperilled
the safeguards of the formal law. As a result, the mere continued existence of wealth is to be marvelled at, rather than the violent reversals of
fortunes which occurred after every political mishap.17 Moreover, the
demands of the polis as a military association implied that it punished
any kind of behaviour which might endanger the military and political
morals and discipline. . . . As a matter of principle, thus, there was no
freedom of personal conduct.18
Weber followed a long tradition of criticism that held Graeco-Roman
Antiquity responsible for cultivating the omnipotence of the state and preventing economic progress. This tradition goes back to the Scottish and
French Enlightenment. It then was taken up in the French postrevolutionary debate (in reaction to the cult of Antiquity fostered by the Jacobins).
In 1819 Benjamin Constant summarized and sharpened it in his famous
essay on the distinction between the freedom of the ancients and that of
the moderns. Finally, the tradition was developed in greater historical detail by late-nineteenth-century authors such as N. D. Fustel de Coulanges
and Jacob Burckhardt.19
CONCLUSION
I have deliberately stressed certain lacunae of Webers account and some

of his more questionable judgments. But that should not obscure the importance of his approach. His analysis is unsurpassed with regard to the
emergence of political structures, the institutionalization of magistracies
acting on the basis of rules defined by the community, the establishment
17
19
18 E&S 1360 = WuG 809.

E&S 1361f = WuG 810.
Benjamin Constant, De la liberte des anciens comparee a` celle des modernes (Paris,
1819) [English translation in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 30728]; Numa Denis Fustel
de Coulanges, La cite antique (Paris, 1864) [English translation: The Ancient City, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]; and Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, 4 vols., Berlin, 18981902). Compare on this tradition Nicole Loraux and
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Formation of Bourgeois Athens: An Essay on Historiography
between 1750 and 1850, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics, Ancient and Modern (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 82140. For the increasing dissociation from the model of
antiquity by the American Founding Fathers see Paul A. Rahe, Republics: Ancient
and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For further refer
ences see Wilfried Nippel, Republik, Kleinstaat, Burgergemeinde,
in Peter Blickle, ed.,
Oldenbourg, 1996), 22547.

Theorien kommunaler Ordnung in Europa (Munchen:
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W ILFRIED N IPPEL
of formal rules for the administration of laws and for the passing of new
laws. Indeed, his analysis opens up comparative approaches that illuminate both the similarities and the differences between the ancient and the
medieval type of citizenry. The fundamental distinction between homo
politicus and homo oeconomicus holds true despite all the objections
that might be raised with respect to specific details. Finally, Webers insistence on the cultural and religious foundations of citizenship cannot be
overrated.20 Again, one may object that his selective treatment of Oriental
cultures (aiming, as it does, at the contrast with the Western world) reveals
a certain Eurocentrism (or Orientalism, the fashionable term). But the
peculiarity of the Western tradition of personal liberty, political participation, and rule of law is not just a projection of cultural prejudice.21 The
notion of Verbruderung,
as an account of the process of individualization
fostered by Christianity, brilliantly captures the fundamental differences
between the West and the various civilizations of the Orient.22 Anyone
who wishes to come to terms with the historical dimensions of this tradition, however it may be constructed, must accept Webers challenge.23
20
21
22
23
Stephen Kalberg, Cultural Foundations of Modern Citizenship, in Bryan S. Turner,

ed., Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993), 91114.
R. W. Davis, ed., The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Donald W. Treadgold, Freedom: A History (New York: New York
University Press, 1990). The latter book is rather disappointing.
See Benjamin Nelson, On Orient and Occident in Max Weber, Social Research 43
(1976): 11429.
This can be seen in the works of John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and
Consequences of the Rise of the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) and Michael Mann, The
Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
The Kantian Idea of Europe
341
In Perpetual Peace and Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, Kant lays out his version of the stages idea of world-historical
development. All societies are located on hierarchically arranged levels of
historical development. Western European nation-states with their emerging republican constitutions, commerce, inchoate federal relations, enlightened self-seeking, competitive motivation of unsocial sociability,
cultivated civilization, and, finally, intimations of a single and universal
culture and morality are closest to the highest stage, yet only halfway there:
We are, to a high degree, cultivated beyond bearing by all manner of social convention and propriety. But we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves
as moral. For the idea of morality belongs to culture; and yet using this idea only in
references to semblances of morality, e.g. love of honour and outward propriety,
constitutes mere civilization.34
All other societies, with their lower political, economic, and cultural
ways, are described and ranked from the standpoint of the European
level. The stage that European societies are approachingof independent
nation-states with republican constitutions and one culture and morality in a federationis universal and cosmopolitan. It is the end-state
to which all others are tending in due course, the level of the development of all the capacities of the human species, and the level of perpetual
peace.35
As the processes of colonial rule and commerce spread around the
globe from the European nations, which will in all likelihood eventually
give laws to all others,36 they stimulate the lower societies to progress
in such a way as to shed their primitive institutions, cultures, and
different kinds of historical faiths, which were appropriate to their
lower stage of development.37 These societies either develop into independent states or become incorporated in the European colonies, which
develop into independent nation-states. Cultures tend to be relative to
the underlying stage of political and economic development. Barbarism
and savagism appear at the inferior, hunter-and-gatherer stage;
civilization and refinement at the superior, commercial stage. The
motive of unsocial sociability, which drives the development of human
34
36
37
Kant, Idea for a Universal History, 36. 35 Ibid., 369 (theses eight and nine).
Ibid., 38.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 125 note. For Kant there is no religious or moral pluralism. There
is only one religion (and one morality) valid for all men in all times. The variety of
faiths historically can be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can
only thereby be different in different times and places.
342
J AMES T ULLY
capacities through individual competition for honor, power, or property,

to secure status among his fellows, appears to emerge at the transition
from shepherding to agriculture and initiates the first true steps from
barbarism to culture. Kant continues:
Without those characteristics of unsociability . . . man would live as an Arcadian
shepherd, in perfect concord, contentment and mutual love, and all talents would
lie eternally dormant in their seed; men docile as the sheep they tend would hardly
invest their existence in any worth greater than that of cattle; and as to the purpose
behind mans creation, his rational nature, there would remain a void.38
Antagonisms among competitive individuals within crude political organizations have the unintended consequence of constructing the foundations of a perfect civil constitution. In the same way the antagonism of
war among political organizations leads unintentionally to the development of federations:
Through wars, through excessive and never remitting preparation for war, through
the resultant distress that every nation must, even during times of peace, feel within
itself . . . [men] are driven to make some initial, imperfect attempts; finally, after
much devastation, upheaval, and even complete exhaustion of their inner powers,
they are driven to take the step that reason could have suggested, even without
so much sad experience, namely, to leave the lawless state of savagery and enter
into a federation of peoples.39
This course of improvement can be discerned first in the history of

the constitutions of the nations on our continent from the Greeks to
the present, and then used as a guiding thread to clarify and predict the
the national histories of other peoples.40 The reason why the process
began in Europe, spread from Europe, and will reach its goal first in
Europe is the superiority of the national characteristics of Europeans
over other races:
The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part,
has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his
passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why
at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them
with weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan,
38
39
40
Kant, Idea for a Universal History, 32.

Ibid., 34. Compare Perpetual Peace, 121. The lawless state of savagery underlined in
the quotation refers to international relations but also to the hunter, gatherer, and fisher
stage of development (Perpetual Peace, 122 and note).
Ibid., 38.
343
the Turks, Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbuss discoveries, they have all
amazed the southern lands with their arts and weapons.41
This worldview is, as Said explained, the vocabulary of classic

nineteenth-century imperial culture. It is imperial in three senses of
this polysemic word. It ranks all non-European cultures as inferior or
lower from the point of view of the presumed direction of European
civilization toward the universal culture. It legitimates European imperialism, not in the sense of being right (which Kant roundly denies) but
in the sense that it coincides with nature and history and the precondition of an eventual just national and world order. Finally, it is imposed on
non-European peoples as their cultural self-understanding in the course of
European imperialism and federalism. Fanons patriotic plea to the Third
World to avoid the imitation of Europe is presumably directed at all three
senses. Decolonized peoples must not fall into the comprehensive identity
given by this scheme and thereby continue imperialism by other means of
dependency. They must refuse it by exploring alternatives and so become
independent.
The first challenge to Kants idea came from one of his former students,
J. G. von Herder (17441803). In Ideas on the Philosophy of the History
of Mankind (178491), Herder defended cultural pluralism.42 He argued
that each culture contains its own unique and incommensurable truth
or worth, and as such could not be subordinated or elevated as inferior
or superior to another.43 Kant reviewed Herders work and reasserted
his view that all cultures can be ranked relative to a developmental logic
and a normative apex. In a particularly revealing passage of the review
(which reasserts the thesis of the Idea for a Universal History), Kant asks
41
42
43
Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997),
64. Kant wrote this in 1764, twenty years before the Idea for a Universal History. However, nothing in the latter text (or in Perpetual Peace) repudiates or contradicts his earlier
view on national characteristics. The whole tenor of the text is complementary to it (see
especially 389). He also continued to write on the racial superiority of Europeans in
1775 (On the Different Races of Men) and 1798 (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point
of View). For an introduction to Kants views on race and national characteristics, see
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 19, 3870.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie de Geschichte der Menschheit (178491),
translated in part as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind, trans. T. Churchill
(New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800).
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 65. Compare Charles Taylor, The Importance of
Herder, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 7999.
344
J AMES T ULLY
rhetorically:
Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited
by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for
thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the
question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been
just as good if the island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy
human beings who merely enjoy themselves?44
Herders work challenges two features of the Kantian idea: the presupposition that all cultures can be ranked relative to a European norm
and that they all develop (once they come into contact with the more
civilized nations) toward that apex. Herder also presents an alternative
attitude of cosmopolitanism as cultural pluralism: the presumption that
all cultures are of intrinsic worth and that they have their own histories. In
the long term Herders cultural pluralism called into question the attitude
of European cultural superiority informing the Kantian idea and helped
to foster an outlook of cultural pluralism. This outlook is expressed in
early-twentieth-century anthropology, the respect for non-European cultures that began to emerge during decolonization, and the more recent
demands of multiculturalism. As Taylor suggests, the demands of multiculturalism rest on the premise derived from Herder that we owe
equal respect to all cultures. This is understood as a presumption that
cultures are of equal worth:
it is a starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the study of another
culture. The validity of the claim has to be demonstrated concretely in the actual
study of the culture.45
Notwithstanding, Herder did not question another feature of the stages

view of cultures and constitutions: the idea that each nation has one culture and that it is independent, separate, and internally uniform. Indeed,
Herder may be said to have put the idea of a national culture on a new and
influential footing. The more recent critics of cultural imperialism have
accepted Herders presumption but challenged his billiard-ball picture
of cultures. They have argued that the culturally complex character of decolonizing and First World nations, the tangled and overlapping struggles
for cultural recognition in all societies today (mentioned by Kymlicka),
as well as the history of cultural interaction and suppression, suggest that
44
45
Kant, Review of Herders Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in Kants
Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), cited in Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 70.
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, 667.
345
cultures are not independent, separate, and internally uniform but overlapping, interacting, and internally contested or negotiated. Moreover,
the multiplicity of cultures does not seem to bear any straightforward
relation to constitutional and economic development or to tend to convergence and uniformity. Quite the opposite.46
Consequently, cultures should be seen, in the words of Said, as contrapuntal ensembles.47 The overlapping, interacting, and internally negotiated character of cultures is expressed as a second presumption
of cultural diversity rather than Herders pluralism or Kants monism.
Reflecting on the cultural diversity and demands for recognition within
the emerging European Union, Jacques Derrida writes that, contrary to
both Kant and Herder, what is proper to a culture is not to be identical
to itself. This is not to say that cultural identity is not important or not
to not have an identity but to be able to take the form of a subject only
in the difference with itself. There is, Derrida suggests, no culture or
cultural identity without this difference with itself.48 This second presumption is, like the first, a working hypothesis, an attitude one takes to
culture, not a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. When
approaching a culture or any demand for the acknowledgment of a culture, one should ask three questions. Are there other cultures or, recalling
Fanon, other activities of cultural discovery and invention that share the
same geographic space and deserve mutual presumptive respect? Is the
culture in question constituted temporally by interaction with other cultures? Are there others who share the culture in question yet contest the
way it is articulated and expressed by spokespersons claiming to speak
for all?49
What are the differences between the attitude toward cultures in the
two presumptions of cultural diversity and in Kants idea of Europe? The
first and most obvious difference is the attitude of presumptive respect
for cultural differences in contrast to the presupposed attitude of cultural
superiority (of Europeans). The second presumption suggests that a citizen or a people will be the bearer of more than one culture, of multiple
46
47
48
49
For Herders view that cultures are separate and incommensurable, see Anthony Pagden,
European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993),
17281. The change in the understanding of cultures as overlapping, interacting, and
internally negotiated is summarized in Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures:
Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
1233.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 52.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael R. Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 9.
For these three questions, see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 129.
346
J AMES T ULLY
cultural identities, and that this diversity is better approached as activities of cultural discovery, invention, reimagination, and contestation in
agonic relation to the powers of cultural imposition and assimilation
than as a diversity of fixed cultural formationsmore Dionysian than
Appollonian.50
The third difference is the understanding that culture is closely related
to identity. Kant understood this as well, but he saw cultural identity, except at the highest stage, as something superficial and irrelevant to ones
identity as a citizen. Ones identity as a citizen is defined in the First
Definitive Article in terms of a metaphysical and universal theoretical
identity, toward which the species is tending, of autonomy: the capacity of rational agents to direct their lives reflectively in accordance with
universal principles. In contrast, cultural identity is seen as an important aspect of ones practical identity. The appropriate acknowledgment of and respect for ones practical identity is now seen as relevant
to ones identity as a citizen. Practical identity refers to the aspects of
citizens identities that matter to them. It is the answer to the question
Who are we? or the structure of strong evaluations in accord with,
and against, which humans live their lives.51 In an influential and representative analysis, Christine Korsgaard describes practical identity in the
following way:
The conception of ones identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view
about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which
you find your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. . . . Practical
identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of
such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a
certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession,
someones lover or friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons
and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations
spring from what that identity forbids.52
50
51
52
For one important attempt to work out the implications of this second difference,
see William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1995).
For these ways of characterizing practical identity, see Michel Foucault, The Subject
and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21013;
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3101; and David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge,
1994), 64216.
Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 101.
347
Fourth, the awareness that the jumble of cultural aspects that make up
ones practical identity matter to ones sense of self-worth has led to the
argument that these cultural aspects require a level of mutual respect in
ones society in order to live the sort of life of self-directed agency presupposed by Kant. John Rawls forcefully argues that self-respect must be
seen as a primary good of a liberal society; self-respect requires a threshold of mutual acknowledgment and respect of citizens practical identities
(or practices of identity formation and reformation).53 Forms of cultural
disrespect (such as racism, sexism, or the a priori ranking of citizens
cultures as superior or inferior in the Kantian scheme) and misrecognition and nonrecognition of cultural differences (such as the suppression
and assimilation of minority cultures and languages) are serious forms
of oppression and injustice, Anthony Laden argues. They undermine the
conditions of self-respect required for free and equal citizenship.54
These four differences mark the fairly widespread transition from and
repudiation of the conception of cultures in the Kantian idea of Europe to
the recognition of the problem of cultural imperialism and the exploration
of the two presumptions of cultural diversity, not only between the socalled First and Third Worlds, but within European and North Atlantic
societies themselves. This change in outlook is in part the achievement
of the critical Enlightenment attitude and, in particular, Fanons contribution to it. Nevertheless, one could agree that this is a change in the
understanding of cultures from Kants idea of Europe but deny that it
entails any change in what is essential to the Kantian idea: the concepts
of constitutions and federations. It is to this that we now turn.
RETHINKING CONSTITUTIONS AND FEDERATIONS
Recall that on Kants account the constitution of every free and independent nation-state should be the same. The constitution is republican, and
this means that it treats each citizen the same, as free and equal. Rightful equality, Kant explains, is that relation among citizens whereby no
citizen can be bound by a law, unless all are subject to it simultaneously
and in the very same way. 55 This idea of equality gives expression
to the principle that all humans are equally worthy of respect because
53
54
55
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 4401.
See the important thesis by Anthony Simon Laden, Constructing Shared Wills: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity, Ph.D. diss., Department of Philosophy,
Harvard University, 1996.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 112, note.
into what Flau-bert called a regulated college of learning, it also reduced the personalities
of even its most redoubtable individualists like Burton to the role of imperial scribe. From
being a place, the Orient be-came a domain of actual scholarly rule and potential imperial
sway. The role of the early Orientalists like Renan, Sacy, and Lane was to provide their
work and the Orient together with a mise en scene; later Orientalists, scholarly or
imaginative, took firm hold of the scene. Still later, as the scene required management, it
became clear that institutions and governments were better at the game of management
than individuals. This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the
twentieth century has become inheritor. We must now investigate as exactly as possible
the way twentieth-century Orientalisminaugurated by the long process of the West's
occupation of the Orient from the 1880s onsuccessfully con-trolled freedom and
knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was fully formalized into a repeatedly produced
copy of itself.
3. Orientalism Now
On les apercevait tenant kurs idoles entre leurs bras comme de grands enfants
paralytiques.
Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have
a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when
you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it;
not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the ideasomething
you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. ...
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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I Latent and Manifest Orientalism

In Chapter One, I tried to indicate the scope of thought and action covered by
the word Orientalism, using as privileged types the British and French experiences of
and with the Near Orient, Islam, and the Arabs. In those experiences I discerned an
intimate, perhaps even the most intimate, and rich relationship between Occident and
Orient. Those experiences were part of a much wider European or Western
relationship with the Orient, but what seems to have influenced Orientalism most was
a fairly constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners dealing with the East. The
boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and
strength, the range of work done, the kinds of characteristic features ascribed to the
Orient: all these testify to a willed imaginative and geographic division made between
East and West, and lived through during many centuries. In Chapter Two my focus
narrowed a good deal. I was interested in the earliest phases of what I call modern
Orientalism, which began during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early
years of the nineteenth. Since I did not intend my study to become a narrative
chronicle of.the development of Oriental studies in the modern West, I proposed
instead an account of the rise, development, and institutions of Orientalism as they
were formed against a back-ground of intellectual, cultural, and political history until
about 1870 or 1880. Although my interest in Orientalism there included a decently
ample variety of scholars and imaginative writers, I cannot claim by any means to have
presented more than a portrait of the typical structures (and their ideological
tendencies) constituting the field, its associations with other fields, and the work of
some of its most influential scholars. My principal operating assumptions wereand
continue to bethat fields of learning, as much as the works of even the most
eccentric artist, are con-strained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by
worldly circumstance, and by stabilizing influences like schools, libraries, and
governments; moreover, that both learned and imaginative
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writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and
intentions; and finally, that the advances made by a "science" like Orientalism in
its academic form are less objectively true than we often like to think. In short, my
study hitherto has tried to describe the economy that makes Orientalism a coherent
subject matter, even while allowing that as an idea, concept, or image the word
Orient has a considerable and interesting cultural resonance in the West.
I realize that such assumptions are not without their controversial side. Most of us
assume in a general way that learning and scholarship move forward; they get
better, we feel, as time passes and as more information is accumulated, methods
are refined, and later generations of scholars improve upon earlier ones. In addition,
we entertain a mythology of creation, in which it is believed that artistic genius, an
original talent, or a powerful intellect can leap beyond the confines of its own time
and place in order to put before the world a new work. It would be pointless to deny
that such ideas as these carry some truth. Nevertheless the possibilities for work
present in the culture to a great and original mind are never un-limited, just as it is
also true that a great talent has a very healthy respect for what others have done
before it and for what the field already contains. The work of predecessors, the
institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective nature of any learned enterprise:
these, to say nothing of economic and social circumstances, tend to diminish the
effects of the individual scholar's production. A field like Orientalism has a cumulative
and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with
traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (govern-
ments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically

determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description).
The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types
of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has
built his work and research upon them, and they in turn have pressed hard upon new
writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or
Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and
ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, re-searched,
administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways.
The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of
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representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into
Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition
of Orientalism seems more political than not, that is simply because I think
Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces and activities. Orientalism is
a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilizations,
peoples, and localities. Its objective discoveriesthe work of innumerable devoted
scholars who edited texts and translated them, codified grammars, wrote dictionaries,
reconstructed dead epochs, produced positivistically verifiable learningare and
always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by
language, are embodied in language, and what is the truth of language, Nietzsche once
said, but
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms in short, a
sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this
is what they are.'
Perhaps such a view as Nietzsche's will strike us as too nihilistic, but at least it will
draw attention to the fact that so far as it existed in the West's awareness, the Orient
was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations, and
connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field
surrounding the word.
Thus Orientalism is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any
one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition (when one refers to an
academic specialist who is called an Orientalist), as well as an area of concern defined
by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions, readers of
novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, and pilgrims to whom the
Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilizations.
For the Orient idioms became frequent, and these idioms took firm hold in European
discourse. Beneath the idioms there was a layer of doctrine about the Orient; this
doctrine was fashioned out of the experiences of many Europeans, all of them
converging upon such essential aspects of the Orient as the Oriental character,
Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, and the like. For any European during the
nineteenth centuryand I think one
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can say this almost without qualificationOrientalism was such a system of truths, truths
in Nietzsche's sense of the word. It is there-fore correct that every European, in what he
could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall
additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered
the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with
"other" cultures. So Orientalism aided and was aided by general cultural pressures that
tended to make more rigid the sense of difference between the European and Asiatic parts
of the world. My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine
willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the
Orient's difference with its weakness.
This proposition was introduced early in Chapter One, and nearly everything in the
pages that followed was intended in part as a corroboration of it. The very presence of a
"field" such as Orientalism, with no corresponding equivalent in the Orient itself,
suggests the relative strength of Orient and Occident. A vast number of pages on the
Orient exist, and they of course signify a degree and quantity of interaction with the
Orient that are quite formidable; but the crucial index of Western strength is that there is
no possibility of comparing the movement of Westerners eastwards (since the end of the
eighteenth century) with the movement of Easterners westwards. Leaving aside the fact
that Western armies, consular corps, merchants, and scientific and archaeological
expeditions were always going East, the number of travelers from the Islamic East to
Europe between 1800 and 1900 is minuscule when compared with the number in the
other direction.' Moreover, the Eastern travelers in the West were there to learn from and
to gape at an advanced culture; the purposes of the Western travelers in the Orient were,
as we have seen, of quite a different order. In addition, it has been estimated that around
60,000 books dealing with the Near Orient were written between 1800 and 1950; there is
no remotely comparable figure for Oriental books about the West. As a cultural apparatus
Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, willto-truth, and knowledge. The Orient
existed for the West, or so it seemed to countless Orientalists, whose attitude to what they
worked on was either paternalistic or candidly condescendingunless, of course, they
were antiquarians, in which case the "classical" Orient was a credit to them and not to
the lamentable modern Orient.
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And then, beefing up the Western scholars' work, there wen numerous agencies and
institutions with no parallels in Oriental society.
Such an imbalance between East and West is obviously a function of changing
historical patterns. During its political and military heyday from the eighth century to the
sixteenth, Islam dominated both East and West. Then the center of power shifted
westwards, and now in the late twentieth century it seems to be directing itself back
towards the East again. My account of nineteenth-century Orientalism in Chapter Two
stopped at a particularly charged period in the latter part of the century, when the often
dilatory, abstract, and projective aspects of Orientalism were about to take on a new sense
of worldly mission in the service of formal colonial-ism. It is this project and this moment
that I want now to describe, especially since it will furnish us with some important
background for the twentieth-century crises of Orientalism and the resurgence of political
and cultural strength in the East.
On several occasions I have alluded to the connections between Orientalism as a body
of ideas, beliefs, cliches, or learning about the East, and other schools of thought at large
in the culture. Now one of the important developments in nineteenth-century Oriental-ism
was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orientits sensuality, its tendency to
despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardnessinto a
separate and un-challenged coherence; thus for a writer to use the word Oriental was a
reference for the reader sufficient to identify a specific body of information about the
Orient. This information seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid; it seemed to
have an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical
location. In its most basic form, then, Oriental material could not really be violated by
anyone's discoveries, nor did it seem ever to be revaluated completely. Instead, the work
of various nineteenth-century scholars and of imaginative writers made this essential body
of knowledge more clear, more detailed, more substantialand more distinct from
"Occidentalism." Yet Orientalist ideas could enter into alliance with general philosophical
theories (such as those about the history of mankind and civilization) and diffuse worldhypotheses, as philosophers sometimes call them; and in many ways the professional
contributors to Oriental knowledge were anxious to couch their formulations and ideas,
their scholarly work, their considered contemporary observations, in language and
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terminology whose cultural validity derived from other sciences and systems of thought.
The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an
untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views
about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I
shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is
found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability
of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. In the nineteenth-century writers I
analyzed in Chapter Two, the differences in their ideas about the Orient can be
characterized as exclusively manifest differences, differences in form and personal style,
rarely in basic content. Every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its
eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine
malleability; this is why every writer on the Orient, from Renan to Marx (ideologically
speaking), or from the most rigorous scholars (Lane and Sacy) to the most powerful
imaginations (Flaubert and Nerval), saw the Orient as a locale requiring Western
attention, reconstruction, even redemption. The Orient existed as a place isolated from the
mainstream of European progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Thus whatever
good or bad values were imputed to the Orient appeared to be functions of some highly
specialized Western interest in the Orient. This was the situation from about the 1870s on
through the early part of the twentieth centurybut let me give some examples that
illustrate what I mean.
Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily
associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological
bases of racial inequality. Thus the racial classifications found in Cuvier's Le Regne
animal, Gobineau's Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines, and Robert Knox's The
Dark Races of Man found a willing partner in latent Orientalism. To these ideas was
added second-order Darwinism, which seemed to accentuate the "scientific" validity of
the division of races into advanced and backward, or European-Aryan and OrientalAfrican. Thus the whole question of imperialism, as it was debated in the late nineteenth
century by pro-imperialists and anti-imperialists alike, carried forward the binary
typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races, cultures, and societies. John
Westlake's Chapters on the Principles
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of International Law (1894) argues, for example, that regions of the earth designated as
"uncivilized" (a word carrying the freight of Orientalist assumptions, among others)

ought to be annexed or occupied by advanced powers. Similarly, the ideas of such writers
as Carl Peters, Leopold de Saussure, and Charles Temple draw on the advanced/backward
binarism9 so centrally advocated in late-nineteenth-century Orientalism.
Along with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized,
and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological
determinism and moral-political admonishment. The Oriental was linked thus to elements
in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an
identity best described as lamentably alien. Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they
were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved
or confined oras the colonial powers openly coveted their territorytaken over. The
point is that the very designation of something as Oriental involved an already
pronounced evaluative judgment, and in the case of the peoples inhabiting the decayed
Ottoman Empire, an implicit program of action. Since the Oriental was a member of a
subject race, he had to be subjected: it was that simple. The locus classicus for such
judgment and action is to be found in Gustave Le Bon's Les Lois psychologiques de
l'evolution des peuples (1894) .
But there were other uses for latent Orientalism. If that group of ideas allowed one to
separate Orientals from advanced, civilizing powers, and if the "classical" Orient served to
justify both the Orientalist and his disregard of modern Orientals, latent Oriental-ism also
encouraged a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world. I have
already referred to this in passing during my discussion of Renan. The Oriental male was
considered in isolation from the total community in which he lived and which many
Orientalists, following Lane, have viewed with something resembling contempt and fear.
Orientalism itself, furthermore, was an exclusively male province; like so many
professional guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its subject matter with
sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writing of travelers and novelists: women
are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they
are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing. Flaubert's Kuchuk Hanem is the
prototype of such caricatures, which were common
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enough in pornographic novels (e.g., Pierre Louys's Aphrodite) whose novelty draws on
the Orient for their interest. Moreover the male conception of the world, in its effect upon
the practicing Orientalist, tends to be static, frozen, fixed eternally. The very possibility of
development, transformation, human movementin the deepest sense of the wordis
denied the Orient and the Oriental. As a known and ultimately an immobilized or
unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality: hence, when
the Orient is being approved, such phrases as "the wisdom of the East."
Transferred from an implicit social evaluation to a grandly cultural one, this static male
Orientalism took on a variety of forms in the late nineteenth century, especially when
Islam was being discussed. General cultural historians as respected as Leopold von
Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt assailed Islam as if they were dealing not so much with an
anthropomorphic abstraction as with a religiopolitical culture about which deep
generalizations were possible and warranted: in his Weltgeschichte (18811888) Ranke
spoke of Islam as defeated by the Germanic-Romanic peoples, and in his "Historische
Spectres o f War
185
The story o f Harriet and Guy Pringle, as told in The Balkan Trilogy and
subsequently The Levant Trilogy, which together form the Fortunes o f War
hexalogy, ostensibly follows the wartime odyssey o f Manning and R. D.
Smith. Her friend Kay Dick remarks that the books are in effect a ruthless
and illum inating analysis o f Olivia M annings m arriage.93 Like Guy
Pringle, Reggie Smith was, according to his friends, the most gregarious
o f m en,94 while Olivia was, like Harriet, colder and more reserved. I
found him a little too woolly and her a little too severe, Ivor Porter, an
English lecturer in Romania before the war, notes in his book about his
wartime activities with the Special Operations Executive.95 If the character
isation appears to be true to life, the story o f Harriets loneliness and mari
tal difficulties in Bucharest seems to gloss over what is known o f M annings
early married life. When Reggie Smith returned to Bucharest with her, he
continued to sleep around as if nothing had changed.96 Olivia, who spoke
no Romanian and had few friends in Bucharest, suffered a painful miscar
riage (at a stage when the novelist Walter Allen had already been asked to
be the childs godfather).97 She attempted to write, and abandoned, a novel
which in essence was the first draft o f the future Balkan Trilogy.
Many o f the fictional characters in The Balkan Trilogy resemble people
who actually lived and worked in Romania and Greece at the time when
M anning was there. The similarities between Guys fictional friend David
Boyd and the historian Hugh Seton Watson extended to physical looks,
interests and even hobbies such as bird-watching. Bella Niculescu, a wealthy
Englishwoman whose Bucharest flat was filled with furniture from Maples
in London, was, according to Ivor Porter, inspired by M annings friend
Sylvia Placa(aIso an Englishwoman married to a Romanian). Sir Montague,
the British am bassador to Bucharest in The Balkan Trilogy, distinctly
resembles the actual ambassador at the time, Sir Reginald Hoare.98 Even
the most outlandish o f Mannings characters, the amiable sponger Prince
Yakimov, was, according to the novelist Francis King, loosely inspired by
the journalist Derek Patmore, who in 1939 published Invitation to Roumania,
a travelogue dedicated to Princess Anne-Marie Callimacki.99
In the Greek volume o f the Trilogy M annings friends and acquaintan
ces from this later period are more or less thinly disguised as fictional
characters. Alan Frewen, Harriets philhellene friend, shares many traits
with the novelist and critic Robert Liddell, who worked for the British
C ouncil in A thens at the tim e .100 The eighteenth Baron D unsany, a
magnificently bewhiskered Irish poet in his mid sixties, who was sent
out to Greece in October 1940 to occupy the Byron chair o f English at
A thens U n iversity, seem s to have been the inspiration behind the
cantankerous Professor Lord Pinkrose, who turns up in Bucharest to deliver
a lecture on Byron and then follows the Pringles to Athens and on to Cairo.
Lord Dunsany was evacuated from Athens on the same ship as Manning
and her husband.101
1 86
Spectres o f War
In spite o f these parallels, it would be wrong to treat The Balkan Trilogy

as ju st a thinly disguised autobiography. The novels involve complex
parallel lines o f narration in which Harriets perspective is intertwined
with Prince Yakim ovs story. Each o f the three volumes consists o f four
parts, named after a particular event in Romanian or European history.
The Assassination, for example, refers to the killing o f the Romanian
Prime Minister, Armand Calinescu, in September 1939; and The Captain
to the strengthening o f the extreme right-wing Iron Guard and the rehabili
tation, in 1940, o f its spiritual father, Comeliu Zelea Codreanu, who was
killed, in Ottoman style, by strangulation, trying to escape from prison in
1938.102 The Fall o f Troy deals with Guy Pringles production o f Troilus
and Cressida in Bucharest, but also alludes to the German victory march
in Paris which coincides with the single performance o f the play.
The Balkan Trilogy can be described as a trilogy o f historical novels
only in a loose sense. Historical events represent a series o f pegs, temporal
foci for personal developments in the lives o f Mannings protagonists. The
kind o f historical tremors Rebecca West confronts in Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon are recounted here at a very private level. Balkan history is what
rumbles and thunders in the background while the characters try, as best
they can, to carry on with their day-to-day lives. At the end o f the Fortunes
o f War hexalogy Manning writes: Then at last, peace, precarious peace,
came down upon the world and the survivors could go home.101 Her main
characters are not heroes but the stray figures left on the stage at the end
o f a great tragedy.104
Arguably, however, the most memorable characters o f her novels are
not the stray British figures, but the two Balkan cities, Bucharest and Athens,
portrayed in the cold light o f the war which was about to change them
beyond recognition. This is particularly true o f Bucharest - and The Balkan
Trilogy is chiefly remembered as a rare English language portrait o f life in
pre-war Romania. The appeal o f the land in Mannings novels lies in the
double remove o f her Romania - an aristocratic, old-fashioned European
Romania overlapping with an oriental, alien one - from its post-war British
readers. Like, more recently, the Rom ania o f Patrick Leigh Ferm ors
Between the Woods and the Water'05 M annings country is both geo
graphically and historically distant. It is a place whose mystique is enhanced
by its transience and fragility, and by the fact that it cannot be revisited.
Rebecca West wrote about Yugoslavia, worrying that the world she had
known might be destroyed for ever. For Manning, writing her novels in the
early 1960s, while Romania was in the grip o f one o f the most ruthless o f
the East European regimes, the destruction o f that world had already been
accomplished.
A m o n g the representations o f in d iv id u al B alkan countries in B ritish
literature, R om ania and A lb a n ia seem to occupy a som ew hat sim ila r place.
A w a y from the m ain B alkan thoroughfares, these countries rem ained, for
Spectres o f War
187
longer than others, the epitome o f the symbolic Balkan unknown, and
twentieth-century British travel writers, from Durham in High Albania in
1906 to Richard Bassett in Balkan Hours in 1990 (There were few more
sinister airports in Europe to land at than Bucharest, begins his description
o f the Romanian capital)106continued to describe them with the same sense
o f discovery as Byron arriving in Tepelena in 1821.
In the 1890s Jonathan Harker, the hero o f Bram Stokers Dracula, had
to reach for an atlas to find the country o f his destination. The situation seemed
little different in the late 1930s. At the first mention o f going to Roumania,
a great many persons, as did myself, would take down their atlas, Sacheverell
Sitwell wrote in the introduction to his 1938 account Roumanian Journey
(which, judging by the oblique references in her novel, Olivia Manning read
while expecting to leave for Bucharest), concluding that: Roumania, there
can be no question, is among the lesser known lands o f Europe.107
Narratives set in the Balkans often provide, in the opening lines, one last
glimpse o f the West. Bram Stokers Dracula begins with a sight o f the
most Western o f splendid Bridges over the Danube. A visit to M ozarts
house in Salzburg marks the beginning o f Rebecca Wests journey into the
Balkan world. Visitors to Montenegro receive their last warnings as their
ships approach Kotor (Cattaro). The first words o f Mannings Trilogy are:
Somewhere near V enice...108Reminding the reader how close the penin
sula is to the well-known cities o f Western Europe makes subsequent de
scriptions appear more extraordinary, precisely because the assertions o f
Balkan Europeanness blend and overlap with deliberately startling ori
ental images. In a manner redolent o f the Romanticist constructions o f the
Balkans, the most exotic o f descriptions are accompanied by images which
underscore the claim that the peninsula obviously belongs to the European
world. The Merry Widow heard much further to the East, in Calcutta, say,
or Hongkong, would never produce this same nostalgia, Sacheverell Sitwell
writes in his Roumanian Journey. Those places are too far away, they exist in
another world with its own sentiments and regrets.109
Much o f The Balkan Trilogy offers Harriet Pringles view o f events, but
the first impressions o f Bucharest are not hers. Prince Yakimov, a half-Irish,
half-Russian aristocrat who considers him self to be a Genuine English
m an, arrives in the Romanian capital on the same Orient Express train as
the Pringles:
Hounded (his own word) out o f one capital after another, he had now
reached the edge o f Europe, a region in which he already smelt the
Orient. Each time he arrived at a new capital, he made for the British
legation, where he usually found some figure from his past.110
Prince Yakimovs first impressions, as he wanders through the town in a
sable-lined coat inherited from his father, are o f an oriental rather than a
European capital city. Besieged by beggars, he notices tramway cars, hung
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Spectres o f War
with passengers like swarming bees,'" peasants in pointed astrakhan caps,

and orthodox Jews with fox-fur hats and long earlocks. He passes through
a basket market, tries unsuccessfully to avoid the stench o f the chicken
market full o f stringy Balkan birds, and finally - lost - reaches the river,
where on the banks o f muddy clay stood houses o f dilapidated Ottoman
elegance.112
After Yakimovs first glimpses of the oriental aspect o f Bucharest, Harriet
Pringle discovers the Latin, Parisian face o f the town. Her impressions,
however, are already influenced by her discoveries about the lifestyle Guy
had built him self before their marriage:
G uy pointed out an archw ay at the end o f the vista. The Arc de
Triom phe, he said.
The Paris o f the East, Harriet said, somewhat in ridicule, for they
had disagreed as to the attractions o f Bucharest. Guy, who had spent
there his first year o f adult freedom, living on the first money earned by
his own efforts, saw Bucharest with a pleasure she, a Londoner, rather
jealous o f his year alone here, was not inclined to share.113
Before the Second World War, Bucharest was one o f the most sophisticated
cities in the Balkans. Amid its great poverty, it alone had a sizeable,
cosmopolitan aristocracy. Its well-known opera house, shops stocked with
expensive imported goods, and luxurious cafes and restaurants are described
in som e detail both in M annings novels and Sacheverell S itw ells
travelogue. I tell you these things to shew you that you are not in the
house o f ignorant country folk who would kill you the moment they saw
your Serbian uniform, but among civilized people. We go to Bucharest
every year for the opera season; and I have spent a whole month in Vienna,
S haw s R aina P etkoff asserts in an accurate, if com ic, reflection o f
Bucharests earlier reputation.114
With the rich much richer than in other Balkan countries, and the poor
much poorer than in all except Albania, the social divisions in pre-war
Bucharest were considerably greater than elsewhere in the region.* English
travellers in the 1930s, including Sacheverell Sitwell, compared the con
trasts o f Bucharest to those seen in India. A frequent conclusion is that,
with all its European pretensions (Manning describes Bucharest shop win
*
The average annual incom e in 1 9 25 -3 0 was $243 in Romania, $284 in Bul

garia, $330 in Y ugoslavia, and $397 in Greece. (Barbara Jelavich, History o f
the Balkans. Twentieth Century , p. 187.) Other Balkan countries lacked
latifundia-owning aristocracies; their societies were made up preponderantly
o f peasants with an embryonic urban bourgeoisie and proletariat. However, the
dim inished status o f Romanias aristocracy follow ing land reforms is reflected
in M annings portrayals o f impoverished princes hanging out in the Athdnde
Iulucc hotel.
Spectres o f War
189
dows where goods have tags like pulloverul, chic, golful and fiveo clockul115 and cafs where people saw themselves in Rome or Paris or,
best o f all, New York)"* the Romanian capital is essentially a Levantine
city. In Bucharest, Prince Yakimov begins to feel the smell o f the Orient.
Sacheverell Sitwell describes this in a more poetic vein, enthusing about
the soft airs o f the Bosphorus that we seemed to breathe at Bucharest.117
(One should, perhaps, mention that the Romanian government paid the
publishers a subsidy o f 500 towards the publication o f Sitwells book.)118
Derek Patmore owns up to his exotic expectations of the Romanian capital:
Bucarest [sic]. The name alone had an exotic sound. I imagined a city o f
domes and minarets, streets filled with a mixed population o f Eastern and
Western types. I had visions o f great houses, furnished in a style o f preWar m agnificence.115
G regor von Rezzori, who was brought up in R om ania and whose
Memoirs o f an Anti-Semite is, alongside Mannings work, probably the
finest account o f Romanian life in European literature outside Romanian
writing itself, writes o f Bucharest in the years immediately before Sitwells
and M annings visit: For all its Art Nouveau villas and futuristic glassand-concrete buildings, Bucharest was as oriental as Smyrna. The Occident,
with its many splendored towered citadels, was far aw ay.120* Forty years
after Mannings departure from Bucharest, the Italian writer Claudio Magris
describes the Communist Bucharest as still being a city in which a Parisian
passage can suddenly turn into an oriental souk:
The Franco-Balkan style grows heavier and more ornate, carried away
by ornamentation and hounded by an abhorrence o f vacuum . . . Art
N ouveau is present with its splendours and squalors, stained glass
windows and decrepit stairways.
The vast Jugendstil hallway o f the Casa de Mode is thronged with
gypsies, while not far o ff the market stalls o f Lipscani display evil
sm elling cakes and brassires that look still warm from use. An
exaggeratedly Parisian passage leads to a series of shops with exhibitions
o f pictures or handicrafts, but when they are closed their black iron doors
become coffins leant up against the w all.121
Manning wrote about Bucharest two decades after she had left it, yet her
images o f the town have enormous immediacy and sharpness. When she
describes the town, her eye is that o f a painter (she had tried her hand at
painting before her marriage and, in her, Bucharest arguably found its
literary Canaletto), depicting street life, and recording colours, proportions
Von Rezzori was a member o f an aristocratic family from Bukovina, a remote

part o f the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was acquired by Romania after
the First World War. His work originally appeared in German.
190
Spectres o f War
and, above all, the light, with great precision. These qualities mark both the
descriptions made from Prince Yakimovs point o f view (After walking a
couple o f miles, he reached the main square as the sun, rising above the
roof-tops, flecked the cobblestones. A statue, heavily planted on a horse
too big for it, saluted the long grey form o f what must be the royal palace) 122
and those seen through Harriets eyes. (The Pringles left by a side door
that opened on to the Calea Victoriei, the main shopping street, where the
blocks o f flats rose to such a height they caught the last rose-violet glow o f
the sun. A glimmer o f this, reflected down into the dusty valley o f the
street, lit with violet grey the crowds that clotted either pavement.) 121
Some o f the m ost m em orable cityscapes o f Bucharest painted by
Manning evoke the town during the changing seasons. Autumn brings
threatening signs o f the harshness o f winter:
With late November came the crivat, a frost-hard wind that blew from
Siberia straight into the open mouth o f the Moldavian plain. Later it
would bring the snow, but for the moment it was merely a threat and a
discomfort that each day grew a little sharper. Fewer people appeared
in the streets. Already there were those who faced the outdoor air only
for as long as it took them to hurry between home and car. In the evening,
in the early dark, there were only the workers hurrying to escape the
cold.124
The winter weather provides some o f the most striking comparisons:
The new year brought the heavy snow. Day after day it clotted the air,
gentle, silent, persistent as time. Those who walked abroad - and these
now were only servants and peasants - were enclosed in flakes. The
traffic crept about, feeling its way as in a fog. When the fall thinned, the
distances, visible once more, were the colour o f a bruise.125
M annings im ages o f the tow n enveloped in sum m er heat have a
shimmering, almost impressionistic quality:
The end o f June brought a dry and dusty heat to Bucharest. The grass
withered in the public parks. Up the Chausee, the lime and chestnut
leaves, fanned by a breeze like a furnace breath, curled, brown and
papery, and started falling as though autumn had come. Each day began
with a fierce, white light splintering in between blinds and shutters.
When people ate breakfast on the balconies, there was a smell o f heat in
the air. By noonday, the ingot o f the sun dissolved in the sky as in a vat
o f molten silver. The roads, oozing tarmac, shimmered with mirages.
The dazzle hurt the eyes.
During the afternoon, the hot air concentrated between the clifffaces o f buildings, seemed visible and tangible in the ochre dust-fog.
Deadened by it, people slept.I2<
Spectres o f War
191
These portraits o f the city are painted on a wide canvas, but Manning
sketches, with equal precision, intimate scenes o f Bucharest street life.
The detailed descriptions o f individual restaurants, cafs, shops or the
interiors o f Romanian households help create a strong sense o f both period
and place.
The centre o f M annings Bucharest is the Athne Palace Hotel, and its
focus in turn is the famous English Bar. Here the gossip-mongers meet the
journalists, and famous politicians rub shoulders with the decadent and
seedy Phanariot princes who spend their days reading free English
newspapers in the lobby. When Manning lived in Bucharest, the Roma
nians were ruled by a monarch o f German extraction, a member o f the
Hohenzollern dynasty. However, most o f the higher aristocracy were by
origin Phanariot Greeks (taking their name from the Phanar (or lighthouse)
district o f Constantinople). By the late 1930s, the Romanian descendants
o f these Greek families had lost most o f their lands and money, together
with much o f their social influence, but they still contributed a decadent,
post-imperial flavour to the social scene in Bucharest. The Phanariots
embodied most clearly the startling but evanescent mixture o f oriental and
European influences which epitomised Bucharest in the eyes o f the British
writers who visited it in the 1930s.
Manning chooses to introduce this unusual social group in one o f the
first episodes o f the trilogy. Prince Hajimoscos and his coterie, hanging
around the English Bar o f the Athne Palace in the hope that someone
would buy them a drink, represent natural companions to Prince Yakimov,
who, through his Russian father (and perhaps, indeed, his Irish mother), is
a descendant o f another dispossessed aristocracy. The encounter with the
Phanariots, which follows Yakimovs ramble through the Ottoman parts
o f Bucharest, contributes to the first impressions o f the city as an alien,
oriental capital, with an end-of-empire, decadent European feel.
Prince Hajimoscos, with mongoloid features and wearing kid slippers,
and Prince Yakimov, with one brown and one black shoe on his feet (a
party prank fully in keeping with his public-schoolboy behaviour but quite
misunderstood by the Romanians, who are too polite to notice English
eccentricities), attend a party given by Princess T eodorescu, in her
apartment in the Athne Palace. The apartment, paid for by a German
baron, is painted black, with black carpets and black furniture, and
represents a suitably outr scene for a party in the course o f which the
guests undress in order to play a game o f Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs. Half-asleep, half drunk, Yakimov eventually finds him self without
any clothes on, and realises that all the guests were naked and shunting
each other in a circle around the room .127
Other accounts o f Bucharest in the 1930s do not fail to mention the
Phanariots. Sitwell owes, in his own words the instigation and encourage
m ent12" for his book to Princess Anne-M arie Callimacki who in 1949,
192
Spectres o f War
from her exile in New York, published a poignantly-named memoir, Yes

terday was Mine, which includes some o f his letters.129 Derek Patmores
Invitation to Roumania is similarly dedicated to Princess Anne-Marie
Callimachi [sz'c] who gave me my invitation. Princess Callimacki intro
duced Sacheverell Sitwell to a number o f Phanariot princes who enter
tained him in their lavish Franco-Byzantine-Ottoman palaces. Roumanian
Journey reflects a fascination with the portraits o f the Romanian aristo
crats ancestors in ceremonial robes o f heavy silk, with their pearls and
long beards. Sitwell loved the poetic-sounding names, such as Basaraba,
Cantacuzene or Mavrocordato. Sir Henry Channon, in his diaries, recalls a
Liberal politician impressed, in a very similar way, by the novelist Princess
Marthe Bibesco, a writer and a famous mondaine and exotic, during her
visit to London. (Marthe was related by marriage both to Prince Emanuel,
who inspired the character o f Saint-Loup in Prousts A la recherche du
temps perdu, and to Antoine Bibesco - Elizabeth Asquiths husband and
Rebecca W ests discreet companion on one o f her visits to Belgrade.) One
can picture the scene, the reclining, luxurious lady in a tea-gown and pearls,
surrounded by roses, and the impressed Under-Secretary, dazzled by the
mise-en-scene, Sir Henry Channon records in his diary, revealing the impact
encounters with the Romanian aristocracy had on the British, but also the
eroticised m ixture o f Orientalist and decadent im aginings which such
encounters could sp ark .130 In an interesting reflection o f the way the
stereotypes and preconceptions discussed in this work influenced mutual
perceptions, Edith, Lady Londonderry, described Marthe Bibescos palace
in Romania as a bit o f England in faraw ay Ruritania', while Marthe herself,
visiting the remote Scottish home o f her close friend, the Prime Minister
Ramsay MacDonald, wondered: What strange caprice o f fate had deposited
me, an international aristocrat, a Romanian, in the midst o f a village in
northern Scotland, to listen to a speech made by this apostle of Socialism?131
In a mirror image o f the Scottish Emily G erards interest in the magical
world o f Transylvania, the Romanian princess writes about Scotland: How
strange is my destiny and how odd that I should feel so perfectly at home
here in this land o f witches and fairies.,m
Sitwells enthusiastic account and Olivia M annings more detached, mel
ancholy observation o f the Phanariot world are divided by not only a dif
ferent attitude to social class but also a crucial two-year gap. During Sitwells
visit in 1937, this circle was impoverished but still discernible. By late
1939 the war, which was to disperse some o f them and make the others all
but indistinguishable from the rest o f the Romanian population, was al
ready looming across the Balkan frontiers. The princes o f the old world,
mingling with the noisy Germans o f the threatening new order, and ob
served by the relatively impoverished English teachers in the bars o f the
Spectres o f War
193
Athne Palace, have the pathos o f spectres; they are, to use Edith Durhams
phrase, another aspect o f the Living Past o f the Balkans.
M annings Bucharest, exuberant and lavish, is similarly a melancholy
presence in spite, or perhaps because of, its enormous luxury. Doomed to
destruction, this Paris o f the East is a proto-Beirut, its wealth and sophis
tication revealed only after they had disappeared. Some o f M annings most
intricate descriptions in the novel sequence are those o f the food on display
in Bucharests restaurants and shops. Sitwells hired pen similarly enthuses
at enormous length about meals consisting o f caviar, fine soups, grillades
o f fillets o f the finest meat, tender poussins, pilaffs o f quail or freshly caught
fish, followed by puddings made with fresh peaches or wild strawberries,
and claims that after pre-revolutionary Russian the Roumanian is the best
native cuisine in Europe.133 Manning gives a different explanation for her
own enthusiasm for food in an interview: 1 think it is because I was so
terribly hungry. Once when I was working in London, I fainted in the street
through lack o f food. And when we reached Rumania, the food was so
rich, so fantastic.134
Depicting H arriets and Prince Yakim ovs dazzled look at the food
displays, M annings descriptions resemble intricate still-life paintings. The
following example is taken from Harriets first visit to a garden restaurant:*
The heart o f the display was a rosy bouquet o f roasts, chops, steaks
and fillets frilled round with a froth o f cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly
about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets o f artichokes,
small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches,
apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other
tins o f caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish
groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground.
Choose, said G uy.135
Bucharests food stores offered just as great a variety. Nowhere are the
colourful displays described in such detail and with such humour as on the
occasion o f Prince Yakimovs visit to Dragomir, Bucharests answer to
L ondons Fortnum and Mason or Fauchon in Paris, and stocked from
R om anias remaining latifundia. Lavishly decorated for Christmas and
surrounded by peasants selling fir trees from the Carpathians and heaps
o f holly, bay and laurel, the shops entrance afforded shelter to some o f
B ucharests m ost persistent beggars, but inside it offered the hungry
Yakimov, a refuge where a gentleman might sample cheese unchallenged
and steal a biscuit or tw o:136
A little department at the door sold imports from England: Quaker Oats,
tinned fruits, corned beef, Oxford marmalade .. . These did not interest
*
In summer Bucharests leading restaurants occupied gardens alongside the

avenues leading out of the city.
194
Spectres o f War
Yakimov who made for the main hall, where turkeys, geese, ducks,
chicken, pheasant, partridge, grouse, snipe, pigeons, hares and rabbits
were thrown unsorted together in a vast pyramid beneath a central light.
He joined the fringe o f male shoppers who went around with intent,
serious faces, examining these small corpses. This was not a shopping
place for servants, not even for wives. The men came here, as Yakimov
did, to look at food, and to experience, as he might not, an ecstasy o f
anticipation.117
Y akim ovs first visit to D ragom ir provides one o f M annings m ost
memorable images o f Bucharest under the shadow o f war - for this was,
literally, one o f the last Christmases o f this kind in the city. When the
American journalist Goldie Horowitz, writing under the pseudonym o f R.
G. Waldeck in her book Athene Palace (sic), describes a visit to the same
place two years later, in 1941, Dragomir is filled with baby-faced German
soldiers carrying candy-boxes.138
M annings descriptions o f Bucharest are not, however, the nostalgia
laden evocations o f a lost aristocratic world, the last corner o f real Europe
o f Sitw ells Roumanian Journey, or - more recently - Patrick Leigh
Ferm ors yellowing m ap o f Balkan wanderings so vividly evoked in
Between the Woods and the Water. Sitwells Romanian palaces, with their
wood-panelled walls, have a doomed, rarefied air, and his Balkan peninsula
represents a poeticised, vulnerable world gazing into Europes feudal past
- a Ruritania with Byzantine boyars instead o f Germanic barons and counts.
M annings bittersweet descriptions convey Bucharests cruelties as well
as its charm. Scenes o f turbulence and political violence, such as the
assassination o f Prime Minister Armand Calinescu in the Chicken Market
in Bucharest (Filled him full o f lead, Galpin broke in. He clung to the
car door - little pink hands, striped trousers, little new patent-leather shoes.
Then he slid down. Patches o f dust on the side o f his shoes.),139 dominate
many pages o f her novels but would be unthinkable in Sitwells quaint
Balkan landscapes. The vividness her work shares with Leigh Ferm ors or
von Rezzoris writings about Romania is created by a mixture o f wonder
and nostalgia for something that is already lost. The sense o f discovery of
a new world is tainted with omens which point to its imminent destruction:
the writers know that the reader cannot revisit the world they describe.
Although written from a much shorter perspective o f time than M annings
recollections, W ests descriptions o f her journeys through the Balkans the fields o f young wheat in Macedonia, the cypress groves o f Dalmatia,
the gorgeous bleakness o f Herzegovina, golden with broom and gorse, the
pine scented moorlands o f Montenegro - are reminiscent o f the images o f
the summer o f 1914 in English literature. Olivia Manning describes a world
clearly burning at the edges, with her English characters fleeing the flame.
Still undisturbed, but wilh (he Continent at war behind if, Athens was, when
140 Imagining the Balkans
Between Classification
and Politics
The Balkans and
the Myth of Central Europe
Beyond and below what was once Czechoslovakia lie the deep Balkans.
They are, it has been said, a sort of hell paved with the bad intentions of
the powers.
John Gunther1
The right question is not Is it true? but What is it intended to do?
S. H. Hooke2
n the geographical and political classifications after World War II, a portion of the
I Balkans had secured an unobtrusive place as part of a common Eastern Europe
perceived as a homogeneous appendix of the USSR by the West; another portion

had been willingly included into Western Europe, something inconceivable but
for the prevailing anticommunist paranoia. In the Balkans themselves, the feeling
of Balkan commonality was pushed aside, and the self-designation followed an EastWest axis. The vanishing of the bipolar world after 1989 saw a nervous search for
more appropriate categories for the organization of academic and journalistic knowledge, principally in the United States. The study of Russia and the Soviet world was
euphemistically renamed Eurasian studies. Eastern Europe also received attention, in an effort to emancipate it not only from the former superpower but also
from the tutelage of Russian studies. A reassessment of East European studies in the
United States argued that the trajectory of Russian history is substantially different, particularly from that of East-Central Europe [which] retained more religious,
cultural, and economic linkages with the West than did the Russians. The Balkans,
too, were contrasted to the the Orthodox lands that eventually fell under the sway
of Moscow. Accepting the three-region division of Europe of the Hungarian historian Jen Szcs as fundamentally correct, the study argued for a further elaboration, namely that Eastern Europe should be divided into two sections, East-Central and Southeast Europe.3
140
Between Classification and Politics
141
Thus the Balkans began to reemerge as a separate entity, albeit under what was
apparently considered a more neutral title: Southeast Europe. While this particular
study was undoubtedly motivated by the lofty goal of stressing the diversity of Eastern
Europe through reclassification, it should be clear by now that the treatment of classification as an outcome of an ordering process as if the organisation of thoughts
comes first, and a more or less fixed classification follows as the outcome is highly
problematic. Rather, the ordering process is itself embedded in prior and subsequent
social action.4 The study in question implicitly accepted the notion of a homogeneous Western Europe to which different Eastern European entities were juxtaposed.
It was simply a version of the West European syndrome to conceive of the entire
Euro-Asian land mass as four Easts (Near, Middle, Far, and Eastern Europe) and only
one West, itself.5 It explicitly grounded itself in the conception of Szcs, one of the
pillars of the Central European ideology, thus elevating the whole Central European
discourse to an important heuristic device.
The restructuring was not confined to academe. In 1994, the State Department
decided to banish Eastern Europe from the lexicon of the departments Europe
bureau: Eastern Europe would now revert to what it was before the start of World
War Two in 1939Central Europe. While it was unclear how an entity was to have
a center flanked only by a west, this episode is a testimony that the claims of the Central
European champions were taken seriously, at least for the sake of diplomatic nomenclature. Later, by speaking about the two large nations on the flanks of Central Europe, Richard Holbrooke intimated that Russia was assuming the role of Eastern
Europe but never spelled it out explicitly, because at the State Department, nomenclature is an expression of foreign policy.6
The newscast tried to reform, too. As of 1 January 1995, the daily report Central
and Eastern Europe of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) split in two daily
digests of the Open Media Research Institute (OMRI): East-Central Europe (the
Visegrd four [Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia], the three Baltic
republics, Ukraine, and Belarus) and Southeastern Europe (the former Yugoslavia,
Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova). In this classification the unarticulated
Eastern Europe seemed to be reserved for Russia. While one need not envisage a
conspiracy with macabre consequences, in general, structures can become self-generating, and the apportioning of knowledge is geared to a subsequent validating of the
structure. OMRIs classification may be attributed to a genuine effort to overcome
the legacy of cold-war divisions, but its Southeastern Europe was castrated exactly
along the former cold-war line: Greece and Turkey continued to be subsumed under
Western Europe and the Middle East.
The great vogue over Central Europe began in the early 1980s with the almost
simultaneous publication of three works by well-known authors representing the
voices of the three countries claiming partnership in the idea: Jen Szcs, Czeslaw
Milosz, and Milan Kundera. The most erudite of the three pieces was written by the
Hungarian historian Jen Szcs, and had enormous influence in Hungary but remained virtually unknown in the West and in Eastern Europe outside the narrow
circle of professional historians. This was due not only to its length and dense professional prose but also to the fact that it did not offer an easy polemical argument.
In a kaleidoscopic summary of several centuries of European development from
the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the end of the eighteenth century, Szcs
argued that the notion of the West had been born already in the ninth century, and
by expanding to the north and east Europa Occidens enlarged its bounds to include
East-Central Europe. In the meantime, a truncated Eastern Europe and SouthEastern Europe . . . took shape under the sphere of influence of Byzantium. The
modern period witnessed the second expansion of the West over the Atlantic and
the almost simultaneous expansion of truncated Eastern Europe, which assumed
its complete character by annexing Siberia. East-Central Europe became
squeezed between those two regions, and at the dawn of the Modern Times . . . it no
longer knew whether it still belonged within the framework of Europa Occidens or
whether it remained outside it.
Szcss piece was not a loner; there was a whole genre of works dealing with the
dilemma of Hungarian identity crucified between East and West, and especially
for the roots of its backwardness. According to Szcs, Hungary carried the predicament of a border region between two opposing centers. These two poles developed
divergent trends: urban sovereignty and intensive commodity exchange growing up
in the interstices between the sovereignties of rival powers in the West versus centralized bureaucratic state structures holding in their grip the traditional urban civilization of the East; Western corporate freedoms and the system of estates against the
Easts ruling power with an enormous preponderance over the fairly amorphous society; the internal principles of organizing society dominating over those of the
Western state, and the reverse in the Eastern case; the different development of serfdom with the Western absolutist state compensating for its disappearance of serfdom,
and the Eastern consolidating it; Western mercantilism with the capitalist company
at its center versus state dominance of the industry in the East; Western evolution
toward national absolutism against Eastern development toward imperial autocracy;
Latin Christianity versus caesaropapist Orthodoxy; and so on.7
His doubtless erudition notwithstanding, Szcs can be criticized on his own
turf. Sometimes he resorted to reductionism, as with Russian absolutism, which he
reduced to Byzantine autocratic mysticism, disregarding the legal and political discussions over absolutism that led to a short-lived but nevertheless constitutional
change in the nature of the Russian polity; despite his considerable historical culture in medieval and early modern history, he conveniently preferred to ignore the
by-now enormousliterature exposing the simplified treatment of the Byzantine
tradition as caesaropapism; more seriously and surprisingly for a historian, he assumed a homogeneity of the West almost out of a political science textbook. Most
importantly, Szcs built his case on the notion of Europe unfolding around two
poles that seemed to have evolved independently of each other; he went so far as to
describe the organic western process of changes in forms, implicitly suggesting an
inorganic process for the East.8 Within a different methodological approach, this
polarized view would have been much more shaded, and the sharp spacial borders
delineated by Szcs, in which he conveniently established his East-Central Europe,
would have been transformed into more transparent and gradual temporal transitions. But Szcs made this conscious methodological choice in order to wrap up an
indirect political message.
In a way, Szcs wrote in what has been aptly called the East European periphrastic where the political case was not readily transparent but followed from the
143
overall argument. Although not drawing explicit political conclusions, Szcs utilized
all the proper terms of the current political science vocabulary. He abundantly employed the problematic notion of civil society, the new cause clbre, the new analytic key that will unlock the mysteries of the social order,9 although the idea of civil
society was developed theoretically only during the Scottish Enlightenment. Szcs
utilized it to show that a societas civilis had appeared in the West already in the midthirteenth century as a synonym for the autonomous society, where the organizing
principles of law and freedom had managed to carve out a plurality of small spheres
of freedom. Even the feudal categories of medieval honor and fidelitas were reinterpreted in terms of human dignity as a constitutive element of the West, not to speak
of the fortuitous combination of virtus and temperantia in European behavior.10
Actually, there was a direct political message, although Szcs chose to present
it from the viewpoint of Istvn Bib: the search for the deepest roots of a democratic way of organizing society. Always careful to hide behind Bib, Szcs outlined his view of the structural preconditions for democracy and presented Hungary as fitting the objective preconditions. His grand finale was an undisguised
appeal for action, again legitimized by Bib: His basic concept, which he put
down several times and meant to serve as a long trend, is also valid and opportune: chances inherent in reality are not necessarily realizedtheir realization
depends on effort and goodwill. Szcss vision, as indeed all the Central European debate, was informed with the grand history . . . of human progress towards
freedom.11 Within this majestic framework, the Balkans were not even deemed
relevant to be analyzed; already at the beginning of his argument, Szcs had disposed of what he called South-Eastern Europe: Since this last area was to secede
from the European structure along with the gradual decline of Byzantium by the
end of the Middle Ages, I shall disregard it.12
The second founding father of the Central European idea was the author of a
much more culturally argued definition, in which he makes the point of Central
Europes liminality to Europe as a whole.13 In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz did not
specifically use the term Central Europe let alone define it. His 1983 essays are a contemplation on the world of poetics by a refined and nuanced intellectual who was
well aware that the twentieth century, perhaps more protean and multifaceted than
any other, changes according to the point from which we view it. Milosz spoke from
what he defined as my corner of Europe, but this was not the Central Europe ascribed to him. It was both broader and more confined than Central Europe. In the
narrow sense, his corner was his Poland, more specifically his even smaller corner in
the Lithuanian periphery, revolving around three axes: the North-South axis, the opposition but also synthesis between Latin and Polish, between Roman classicism and
its ancient poets and the poetry produced by his Polish predecessors; the West-East
axis, between home and the new capital of the world, Paris; the Past-Future axis, the
quality of poetry as a palimpsest that, when properly decoded, provides testimony to
its epoch.14
These three axes should not be associated with another opposition delineated
by Milosz which, decontextualized, has been taken to represent his definition of
Central Europe. I was born and grew up on the very borderline between Rome and
Byzantium was the introduction to his birthplace, which was taken to mean that
thus only from the outer edge of Europe, which is Central Europe or, in this case,
Wilno, can one properly understand the true qualities of Europeanness. Although
George Schpflin was aware that such an interpretation raises the more or less geographical and semantic question that if Central Europe constitutes the outer edge of
Europe, where is Eastern Europe to be found? he still persisted in it.15
Milosz had an ambivalent attitude toward Russia: he spoke of the centuries-long
division of Europe between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity but at the
same time hastened to specify that the sense of menace he felt came not from Eastern Christianity, of course, but from what has arisen as a result of its defeat.16 In order
to illustrate Russian isolation, he went so far as to quote the absurd statement by Russian historian Georgii Fedotov that all of Russias misfortunes had stemmed from
having substituted the universality of Greek for the Slavic idiom. And yet,
he never entirely purged Russia from Europe; what he did was to oppose Russian
messianism to the body of Western ideas.
Milosz was also much more political than his interpreters allowed him to be. He
not only raised his voice for the emancipation of all of Eastern Europe but he was
doubly political: directly, by documenting the cynicism of the cold-war division of
Europe, and more subtly, by recognizing the political significance of cultural images:
The literary map of Europe, as it presented itself to the West, contained until recently numerous blank spots. England, France, Germany, and Italy had a definite
place . . . ; while to the east of Germany the white space could have easily borne
the inscription Ubi leones (Where the lions are), and that domain of wild beasts
included such cities as Prague (mentioned sometimes because of Kafka), Warsaw,
Budapest, and Belgrade. Only farther to the east does Moscow appear on the map.
The images preserved by a cultural elite undoubtedly also have political significance as they influence the decisions of the groups that govern, and it is no wonder that the statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off a hundred million Europeans from these blank areas in the loss column.17
Once the discussion over the fate of Central Europe was in the air, Milosz rejoined it with an essay that at first glance left the impression that he was becoming
much more explicit about his Central Europeanness: I assume there is such a thing as
Central Europe, even though many people deny its existence.18 Although he set himself the task to define specific Central European attitudes, it is a tribute to the humbleness and intellectual integrity of Milosz that whenever he would venture into broader
generalizations, he was careful to do so within the confines of the world he knew best:
the domain of literature.
To Milosz, the most striking feature in Central European literature was its awareness of history. The other characteristic trait was that a Central European writer
receives training in irony. Here Milosz made a rare lapse into reductionism by stating that, in contrast to the Central European realm of irony, Russian contemporary art and literature, obstinately clinging to cliches, frozen by censorship, seems
sterile and unattractive. This statement is preposterous in the face of a splendid
line of authors like Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov, Isac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei
Platonov, Venedikt Erofeev, and Vladimir Orlov, to mention but a few, but was the
only breach of bon ton. Although it seemed that Milosz had begun to accept the
short formula of Central Europe as being a Pole or a Czech or a Hungarian, when
145
he elaborated on the different literatures partaking in the Central European literary

experiment, he enumerated Czech or Polish, Hungarian or Estonian, Lithuanian
or Serbo-Croatian; he also referred to the Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania. Without mentioning the Balkans separately, Milosz clearly embraced them together with
the rest of the non-Russian Eastern Europe in his Central Europe which was an act
of faith, a project, let us say, even a utopia.19 It was the ambiguity toward Russia
that came to the fore.
This ambiguity was transformed into prohibitive certainty in the best known
and most widely read of the three pieces, the essay on Central Europe by the man
who more than anyone else has given it currency in the West . . . a Czech, Milan
Kundera.20 Now, rereading Kundera after more than ten years is disappointing in
terms of logical consistency and moral integrity: the essay sounds melodramatic and,
at times, outright racist but, given the historical context of the time, its emancipatory
pathos was genuine; thus, the sincere emotional appeal, alongside its excessive reductionism, explains the attention that it received. Kunderas essay became the
focus of an intensive intellectual turnover, and it has become impossible to approach
the original text without taking into account the ensuing powerful but less numerous
critiques and the more numerous but less powerful endorsements. It is as if the initial
text has lost its autonomy; one cannot revisit it with innocence.
This forces me to resort to a different strategy: presenting Kunderas view through
the eyes of people familiar with the debates and who share in his belief about the
distinctiveness of Central Europethe editors of In Search of Central Europe. This
postmodernist technique is justified by the fact that Kundera himself did not allow
the publication of his essay in their volume for reasons of his own, and Schpflin
and Nancy Wood supplied a summary of his argument. Iver Neumann throws some
light on the reasons for Kunderas refusal by evoking the postscript to the Czech version of A Joke where he insisted that the essay falls into that part of his production
which he disowns, because it was tailormade for Western consumption.21 According
to Schpflin and Wood, Kundera recast the upheavals in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1956, 1968, 1970, and 1981) not as East European dramas but
as quintessentially dramas of the West. In Kunderas schema, it is not politics, but
culture which must be seen as the decisive force by which nations constitute their
identity, express that identity and give it its own distinctive mould. Within this cultural approach, Kundera argued that the Central European identity as the identity of
a family of small nations was an inextricable part of the larger European experience,
while at the same time having its own distinctive profile. In the case of Russia, on the
other hand:
Kundera asserts . . . both the continuity of Russian traditions and their profound
difference from the European ones. This explains why in his view Central Europes
adherence to the West is a natural disposition, arising as it does from a constant and
intimate intermingling of cultural traditions, whereas Russia represents an other
civilization, a fundamentally different culture, despite its periods of cultural
reapprochement with Europe.22
Kunderas essay produced a torrent of reactions revolving around the complete

banishment of Russia from Europe as an essentialized alien. The strongest voice to
object against assigning a demonic power to the Russians was Milan Sime kas.
Responding to Kunderas allegation that when the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they did everything possible to destroy Czech culture,Sime ka pointed out that
we are not too distant from the events, however, to forget that it was not the Russians
who put paid to Czech culture . . . It was our lot: Central Europeans born and bred.
. . . Our spiritual Biafra bore an indelible local trademark. Kundera ascribed much
weight to the pan-Slavic idea for the fate of Central Europe: I feel that the error made
by Central Europe was owing to what I call the ideology of the Slavic world. He
did not go so far as to assert that Czechs were not Slavs (like Joseph Conrad in 1916 for
the Poles) but he affirmed that apart from their linguistic kinship, neither Czechs nor
Poles had anything in common with the Russians.23
There is a detail in Kunderas argumentation that stands out because it was replicated later in an almost symmetrical way by his compatriot Vclav Havel. Kundera
evoked Kazimierz Brandys meeting Anna Akhmatova, who responded to his complaint about his banned works that he had not encountered the real horror: being
imprisoned, expelled, and so on. To Brandys these were typically Russian consolations, the fate of Russia was foreign to him, Russian literature scared, indeed horrified him; he preferred not to have known their world, not to have known it even
existed. Kundera added: I dont know if it is worse than ours, but I do know it is
different: Russia knows another (greater) dimension of disaster, another image of
space (a space so immense entire nations are swallowed up in it), another sense of
time (slow and patient), another way of laughing, living, and dying.24 In 1994, Joseph Brodsky wrote an open letter in response to Havels speech on the nightmare of
postcommunism. This was a philosophical manifesto of a kind and, without necessarily agreeing with it, one has to respect it for its profound intellectual effort and
honesty. It addressed problems of human nature and society, the role and responsibility of intellectuals, particularly philosopher-kings. Havels polite response was
essentially a rebuttal; he refused to discuss the crucial problems raised by Brodsky
(about the legacy of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, and Burke, compromise and
saintness, survival and conformism, mass society and individualism, bureaucracy
and culture, and so on), on the ground that these matters were too complex and it
would require an essay at least as long. Instead, he wrote an essay about one-third
of Brodskys in length whose only idea was that there was an essential difference
between their experiences:
For ordinary people in your country of birth, any change aiming at a freer system,
at freedom of thought and action, was a step into the unknown. . . . By contrast,
Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom and democracy in
the late nineteenth century under the Austro-Hungarian constitutional monarchy.
. . . The traditions of those times live on in family life and books. Thus, although
the renewal of freedom is difficult and inconvenient in our country too, freedom
was never a completely unknown aspect of time, space and thought.25
Thus, while the Russian was raising existential problems of universal significance,
the civilized Central European was responding in a patronizing manner evoking, in
a typically provincial way, a relatively less significant issue about differences of degree in historic experiences of two countries (of which one is a continent and thus
147
even less subject to sweeping generalizations). Maybe the issue does not deserve more
than the verdict about the Czechs who, like other nations at the fringes of the West,
were particularly susceptible to the siren song of this elitist snobbery, the convenient presumption of the unbridgeable cultural gap between West and East.26 In
this, Russia was becoming Central Europes constituting other. What was remarkable in Kundera is that there was no mention of the Balkans whatsoever; the only
opposition was Russia.
Thus, at the beginning round of its articulation, there was an attempt to define
the Central European idea both in cultural (Kundera and Milosz) and in historical
terms (Szcs) while always describing it in opposition to Russia. At this stage, the Balkans
simply did not exist as a separate entity: they were either ignored or subsumed in a
general Eastern Europe or sometimes, although rarely, in Central Europe itself. The
Central European idea of the 1980s was an emancipatory idea, a metaphor of protest, which in itself was a subspecies of a whole genre dealing with Europeanness,
represented in different periods and intensity in all European countries. The main
issues were the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of Europe, and since a lot more was at
stake than merely intellectual prowess, the discussion was highly impassioned.
During the second round in the development of the Central European idea until
1989the Eastern European annus mirabilismany works were published in both
mainstream Western editions and publications of the East European intellectual
emigration and the samizdat: Cross Currents, East European Reporter, Eastern European Politics and Society, Daedalus, Cadmos, The New York Review of Books, Svcede tv,
La Nouvelle Alternative, Nowa Koalicja, and so on. A representative part was assembled
in the 1989 volume In Search of Central Europe. The introductory essay admitted that
the discussion over the Central European identity takes a putative Central
Europeanness as its launching pad, seeks to define it in terms most favourable to its
unstated though evident goals and insists that the whole concept is apodictic, that it
is up to its opponents to prove it false. The evident goals were vaguely described in
negative terms: the construction of a consciousness emphasizing values other than
those propagated by the existing system and of an identity authentic enough to act
as an organizing principle for those seeking something other than Soviet-type reality.27
Schpflin followed Szcs in the central attempt to prove the essential contrast
between Russia and Western Europe, and then position Central Europe between them
but as an organic part of the West because the incompatibility between the two ideal
types effectively precluded transitional models. The real differences were cultural,
thereby making a discussion of European values essential. Europe had developed
values specific to itself and these appear to be immanent, as well as ineradicable.
How such statements accommodate the spirit of experimentation and innovation in
the European cultural tradition in which no solution is permanent is difficult to
envision logically, but logic is not the most important prerequisite for a political
manifesto. And this is how Schpflin himself conceived of it: In the late 1980s, all
the evidence suggests that the identity of Central Europeanness is attractive enough
to a sufficiently wide range of people to give it a good head of steam.28
Despite the clear distinction from Russia, this treatment of Central Europe was
not explicitly defined in opposition to the Balkans. The rare and indirect references
190 Afterword to the Updated Edition
Afterword to the
Updated Edition
Since the publication of Imagining the Balkans over a decade ago, political events in
Europe have eloquently illustrated the law of unintended consequences. After 1989,
Central Europes emancipatory ideology (over which much scholarly ink was spilled)
became a device entitling its participants to a share of privileges, most importantly
accession to NATO and front seats for the European Union. While the final historical
verdict may legitimate this strategy, an unintended consequence has been the death
of Central Europe as an idea. Extending a protective arm around the old centers of
the Habsburg Empire, the West, motivated in part by sentiment, neatly followed the
new trench lines of Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilizations.1 Tony Judt wrote in
1997 that this would create a sort of depressed Eurosuburb beyond which Byzantine
Europe would be made to fend for itself, too close to Russia for the West to make an
aggressive show of absorption and engagement.2
Things changed almost overnight with the beginning of NATO expansion in 1997.
Since 1989, the question of the alliances mission has never ceased to be high on both
the European and U.S. agenda. With the disbanding of the Warsaw pact in 1991 and
the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1992, NATOs main adversaries and targets
had ceased to exist, and with them its raison dtre. There were serious plans in
Europe to disband NATO and build alternative security systems confined to the continent. Yet NATO remained the only truly transatlantic institution in which the United
States continued to play the role of a European great power, and it was reluctant to
lose this position. The United States was and continues to be the chief advocate for
further NATO expansion, despite a 1990 pledge that NATO would not expand beyond German borders, while Europes proximity to and dependence on Russian natural resources make it more circumspect.3 In 1997 three former Warsaw Pact countries
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republicwere invited to join the alliance and
became members in 1999. The invitation was extended to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
190
Afterword to the Updated Edition
191
Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 2002, all of which joined in 2004. In
2008 another two Balkan countriesCroatia and Albaniawere invited, and
Macedonia is bound to follow soon.
This trajectory of NATOs evolution, alongside the development of events that
led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, brought about the unexpected intersection of
two processes. Until 1999, the international community confined its pressure on and
involvement in Yugoslavia almost exclusively to the United Nations. There were a
few minor UN-sanctioned NATO operations after the Srebrenica massacre and before the Dayton accord, including the maritime enforcement of the arms embargo
and the brief bombing of Republika Srpska in Bosnia in 1995. However, this intervention as well as contemporaneous events in Somalia and even the First Gulf War were
aimed at restoring or preserving the status quo.4 Even the ethnic cleansing of Krajna,
the secessionist Serb enclave in Croatia, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were
swept away by the Croatian army in 1995, was done with the active approval and tacit
participation of the United States.
The three-month-long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, on the other hand,
for all intents and purposes carried out by the United States, marked a new precedent.
It effectively underwrote the secessionist claims of a minority population and set the
stage for Kosovos full independence some nine years later, another precedent, whose
ominous repercussions play out in the Caucasus today. As Charles King aptly comments: Even at the time of the NATO air strikes, it was difficult to distinguish an
intervention to prevent genocide, from one intended to support the long-term political aims of a guerilla army.5 This became a fundamental departure from the treatment of similar conflicts (between Palestinians and Jews in Israel, Kurds and Turks in
Turkey, Kurds and Arabs in the First Gulf War, and others) where sovereignty and
territorial integrity had been the dominant principle since the end of the Second World
War. In another respect the Kosovo war saw what one observer has called the rise of
humanitarian hawks and became the dress rehearsal for American unilateralism that
culminated in the Second Gulf War.6 In this respect, to borrow from Norman Daviess
history of Poland, the Balkans once again became Gods playground, a laboratory
for experimentation with new approaches and solutions.
There were a host of political and moral considerations for the 1999 intervention, not least among them the desire to revive the last European organization in which
the United States played a leading role.7 Whatever the motivations, the bombing
clearly had unintended consequences. Before the Kosovo war, the dominant paradigm applied to the Balkans translated into the practical ghettoization of the region.
The pre-Kosovo European Union visa regime accepted Central Europe but not the
rest of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where restrictions were placed on the movement of populations. This was balkanism in action. The rhetorical legitimization
of the 1999 interventionas defense of universal human rightseffectively brought
the Balkans back into the sphere of Western politics. Both the bombing and its aftermath bound Europeans and Americans much more closelyeven inextricablyto
the Balkans. Through KFOR, the NATO-led force under UN mandate, both Americans and Europeans began running two de facto protectorates (Kosovo and BosniaHerzegovina). There emerged, for the first time, a significant lobby among Eurocrats
who believed that it would be in Europes best interests to bring the Balkans into the
European sphere, rather than ghettoize them. Eight East European countries (Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania)
were admitted to the EU in 2004. Visa restrictions were suspended for two Balkan
countriesBulgaria and Romaniaand they were admitted in 2007. Although a general EU expansion fatigue has set in, it is likely that Croatia, one of the three official
Balkan candidates alongside Macedonia and Turkey, will be admitted in due time.
Albania and the other remaining Yugoslav splinters have all been recognized as potential candidates. All of this has been accompanied by the curious but predictable
subsiding of the balkanist rhetoric, though it is still encountered abundantly in journalism and fiction, as well as scholarship.8 Even the vocal and often spiteful objections to Turkeys accession focus on Islam, Middle Eastern culture, or womens and
human rights; but they are not clad in the balkanist rhetoric.
When I originally conceived of and wrote Imagining the Balkans, my motives
were manifold, but I was and continue to be very open about my political agenda:
I resented the ghettoization of the Balkans, and the book was, among other things, a
response to that. I refrained from generalizing on scholarly output, maintaining that,
in principle, the scholarly project moves along a different line from the production
of popular mythology, and only occasionally intersects with it. I did not deny that a
great number of the scholarly practitioners of Balkan studies might privately share a
staggering number of prejudices; rather, as a whole, the rules of scholarly discourse
restrict the open articulation of these prejudices. I still believe this to be true, and if
I have erred, it is only in the direction of too much lenience.9 Now journalists too are
becoming more careful of how they articulate opinions about the Balkans. We even
have a new politically correct designation: the Western Balkans. While during the
Cold War Yugoslavia was neatly exempt from any connection to the Balkans, its civil
war in the 1990s was generalized as a Balkan war, although none of the other Balkan
countriesGreece, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, even Albaniawere in danger of
entering it. Now, with the changed political conjuncture, one speaks only about the
Western Balkans as a problematic zone, and the rest of the Balkans are exempt from
the designation. Thus, while the balkanist rhetoric is still with us, conveniently submerged but readily at hand, it no longer serves power politics. Balkanism has not disappeared, but has shifted, for the time being, from the center stage of politics.
This may allow us to reflect more calmly on the scholarly project of making sense
of the Balkans. In what follows, I would like to focus on the theoretical relevance of
the book in light of my own further research and refinement of my conceptual thinking, particularly as related to the continuous elaboration of the categories of analysis
suggested in Imagining the Balkans. I argued that a specific discourse, balkanism,
molds attitudes and actions toward the Balkans and could be treated as the most persistent form or mental map in which information about the Balkans is placed, most
notably in journalistic, political, and literary output. In introducing the category of
balkanism, I was directly inspired byand at the same time invited critical comparison toSaids orientalism, as well as the subsequent literature on postcolonialism.
While, understandably, most readers attention was dedicated to the six chapters of
the book that described, exposed, and critiqued the balkanist discourse, the seventh
chapter, dealing with the realia of the Balkans, remained overshadowed; and the book
was perceived by some as solely a deconstructivist exercise. Others, conversely, felt
193
that this final chapter, in which I introduced the concept of historical legacy, deviated from a modernist approach back to a realist and empirical one. Here I will try to
address two topics relevant to this discussion: one is the further elaboration of my
reluctance to subsume balkanism within postcolonialism; the other to develop the
general relevance of the notion of historical legacy.
A day before Edward Saids death, Gayatri Spivak wrote the preface to the Serbian
translation of her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, which she later dedicated to
her friend and ally, the founder of postcolonial studies, Edward Said.10 The opening phrase of this preface established a powerful link between balkanism and
postcolonialism: The translation of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason into Serbian is
an instructive event for me. The relationship of postcolonial theory to the Balkan as
metaphor is a critical task for our world.11 In response to Spivak, Obrad Savi?, translator of her work and acting president of the Belgrade Circle, wrote that with the passing of Said, the great burden of spreading postcolonial theory has now fallen on
your back. What I can promise at this moment is that you can always count on complete and unconditional support from your friends in and around the Belgrade Circle.
We are small, but we never let go!12
This emotional pledge and assertion of a correlation between balkanism and
postcolonialism, as well as my earlier reluctance to link them together, prompted
Duan Bjeli?, another prominent member of the Belgrade Circle, to organize a panel
at the 2004 convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities to address the
relationship between these two categories. At the conference, I discussed two broad
issues: first, the meeting points (if any) between the categories and phenomena of
balkanism and postcolonialism; second, the appropriateness or utility of approaching balkanism from a postcolonial perspective. Simply put: are there intersections
between balkanism and postcolonialism, and if so, are they productive?
When I started writing this book, whose working title was Balkanism, I found to
my surprise and delight that balkanism was an uninhabited category, something exceptionally rare in the humanities. This circumstance allowed me to use the term as
both a mirror and foil of orientalism, to both pay homage to Edward Said and to
argue for a substantive difference between the two categories and phenomena. To put
it succinctly, balkanism expresses the idea that explanatory approaches to phenomena in the Balkans often rest upon a discourse or a stable system of stereotypes that
place the Balkans in a cognitive straightjacket.13 I argued for the historicity of
balkanism, which was shaped as a discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century, but whose genealogy can be traced to patterns of representation from the sixteenth century onward. I thus insisted on the historical grounding of balkanism in the
Ottoman period, when the designation Balkan first entered the peninsula. Arguably,
some aspects of the balkanist discourse grew out of the earlier schism between the
churches of Rome and Constantinople, but the most salient aspects emerged from the
Ottoman period.
The Balkans have a number of different incarnations or manifestations, which
can be roughly grouped into four categories. At its simplest, Balkan is a name: initially, the name of a mountain, used increasingly since the fifteenth century when it
first appeared, until the nineteenth century, when it was applied to the peninsula and
region as a whole. Balkan is also used as a metaphor. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, it became a pejorative, triggered by the events accompanying the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of small, weak, economically backward
and dependent nation-states, striving to modernize. The difficulties of this modernization process and the accompanying excesses of nationalism created a situation in
which the Balkans began to serve as a symbol for the aggressive, intolerant, barbarian,
semi-developed, semi-civilized, and semi-oriental. It is this use and its present utilization in the real world of politicsbalkanismthat shapes attitudes and actions
toward the Balkans. If there is a tentative connection to postcolonial theory, it is with
this aspect of the Balkans, and Spivak is correct in carefully linking it only to the Balkan
as metaphor.14 Unlike the Orient, however, the Balkans can be addressed as a scholarly category of analysisa concrete geographic regionand in this capacity it is
currently most often used as a synonym of Southeastern Europe. Finally, the Balkans
can be approached and interpreted through the notion of historical legacy, which is
intimately intertwined with the character of the Balkans as region and, thus, linked to
its concreteness.
There are obvious similarities between balkanism and orientalism. First and foremost, they are both discursive formations. Very much like orientalism, the Balkans
can serve as a powerful metaphor. Yet, the main difference between the two concepts
is the geographic and historical concreteness of the Balkans versus the mostly metaphorical and symbolic nature of the Orient. The lack of a colonial predicament for
the Balkans also distinguishes the two, as do questions of race, color, religion, language, and gender. The most important distinction, however, is what I perceive as the
pull of other essential aspects of the Balkans, which challenge the scholar to deal with
the ontology of the Balkans, rather than simply with its metaphoric functions. In a
way, Saids orientalism, too, was a concrete historically-inspired discussion: it was the
Palestinian predicament in the era of late imperialism. However, it was clad in such
a generalizing discourse that it proved to be transportable and became metaphorically appropriate for designating the postcolonial as a whole. I would argue that, among
others, the circumstance that allowed Said to do so was the elastic nature of the Orient. Granted, one could also note the authors different approaches and backgrounds:
orientalism exposed by a literary critic, balkanism analyzed by a historian. Here we
can already see the first methodological distinction (albeit not necessarily incompatible): one a structuralist (or, rather, poststructuralist) theory; the other an essentially
historical approach and interpretation.15
As a whole, one may generalize that the quarter-century after the appearance of
Orientalism saw a disciplinary shift in third world scholarship from sociological and
economic analysis to cultural and theoretical/semiotic/discursive analysis, and the
simultaneous appearance and maturation of postcolonial and global studies.
Postcolonial studies challenged the theoretical models and metanarratives built on
the earlier dominant paradigms of modernization, development, and world systems
theory. The problem is that postcolonialism itself became a new metanarrative, though
it is only fair to say that, despite some conservative hysteria, it has never been truly
institutionalized. There are only a handful of departments, centers, or programs in
postcolonial studies, whereas the study of globalization receives much more attention and funding. Nonetheless, postcolonial studies have undoubtedly achieved an
honorary status even if some are positing a melancholic phase16 or at least are seriously
195
scrutinizing where, if anywhere, postcolonial studies are heading. It is quite interesting to note that it is precisely at this moment that some East European intellectuals
are beginning to pose the question of their relation to the postcolonial.17 To return to
the most general understanding of postcolonialism as a cultural discipline dedicated
to the analysis of discourse, the central question is: can the interpretation (mine or
someone elses) of balkanism as a discourse be treated as a concrete historical/geographic version of postcolonial studies? What are the benefits of comparison? And, if
some (as I do) maintain that this is difficult and not necessarily fortuitous, why the
insistence on the distinction?
David Spurr offers two definitions of the postcolonial: first, as a historical situation marked by the dismantling of traditional institutions of colonial power; second,
as a search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era. While the first is the
object of empirical knowledge, the second is both an intellectual project and a
transnational condition that includes, along with new possibilities, certain crises of
identity and representation.18 My objections to the application of postcolonialism
to the Balkans mostly concern the first meaning of postcolonialism. Postcolonial studies are a critique of postcoloniality, the condition in areas of the world that were
colonies. I do not believe the Ottoman Empire, whose legacy has defined the Balkans,
can be treated as a late colonial empire. First, there was no abyss or institutional/legal
distinction between metropole and dependencies. Second, there was no previous stable
entity which colonized. The Ottoman Empire became an elaborate state machine
and an empire in the course of shaping itself as an expanding polity, which was an
organic whole in all its territories. Third, there was no civilizing mission comparable
to the French or the English colonial project. Fourth, there is no hegemonic cultural
residue from the Ottoman Empire comparable to the linguistic and general cultural
hegemony of English in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere, or of French in Africa and Indochina. There is also the issue of self-perceptions. Subjectivity matters,
after all, and contemporaries in the Balkans under Ottoman rule did not describe
themselves as colonial subjects. The only party that insisted on its semicolonial status
was the Ottoman Empire itself, as voiced by some intellectuals at the time and others
during Turkeys Republican Era. These factors also apply as a whole to the Habsburgs.
The Romanov Empire, while colonial empire par excellence in the East and in the
South, was different in its relations to the Balkans, where the above patterns mostly
held true. I would extend the same verdict to the Soviet Union in relation to its East
European satellites (a case of a possible empire, although not uncontested historiographically),19 though its relationship with Central Asia or the Caucasus might qualify
as a colonial empire.20 In light of this, up to now postcolonial studies have not really
made methodological inroads in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe as a whole, in
contrast to Wallersteins world-systems theory, immensely popular in Greece and
Turkey and widely read in some East European countries even before 1989.
Should one be pedantic about defining empire and colonialism? Maybe not.
For structuralists of any kind, the Spanish empire is not much different from the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, or the Russian. In a way, they are all empires, and they
are all colonial. But I would be surprised if any scholarly convention held a panel on
the postcolonial sensibilities of fifth-century Gaul or sixth-century Iberia after the
collapse of the Roman Empire. Despite its universalist articulation, postcolonialisms
development is closely linked to the Indian subcontinent and Africa of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Even the nature of Latin American postcolonialism is contested.21 The difference between the postimperial and the postcolonial is primarily
the concern of the historian, yet each case requires a very different theoretical framing.
In an otherwise positive review of Imagining the Balkans, Gregory Jusdanis took
me to task for refusing to consider Balkan societies as postcolonial: While it is true
that the social, political and economic relationships between the European imperial
powers and their overseas possessions differed from those between the Ottoman state
and the Balkans, why could the wars of independence against this rule not be considered postcolonial? He further pointed out that attempts by nationalist historiographies to cleanse their traditions from the Ottoman legacy can be read as postcolonial
endeavors to deny the cultural influence of the former ruler, and asked: Is this not
also the typical reaction of every nationalist movementto distinguish itself from
the polity against which it rebels?22 Certainly it is, but this presents a methodological conundrum: is every national movement necessarily anticolonial, and does it always produce a postcolonial situation? Time-bound and place-bound specificity
matters, not only in order to avoid cognitive fallacies, but on ethical grounds as well.
The emancipatory mantle of postcolonialism all too often serves as a cover for the
perpetual lament of self-victimization.
Finally, any meaningful scholarly analysis has to do with the questions we ask,
and the most adequate framing of the responses. The question that had interested me,
and continues to interest me, is the ontology of the Balkans. I developed the idea of
the Balkans as the Ottoman legacy, after a lengthy deconstruction of the discourse, in
an effort to offer a reconstruction. This produced, I am afraid, misunderstanding by
some; so I will rephrase it as a question with serious scholarly, political, and moral
implications: How do we study historical regions?
Regions and regional identities have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years and are now studied with all the seriousness once conferred primarily on
national identities.23 Where regional allegiances were once seen simply as leftovers
of provincial mentalities not yet co-opted by the nation-state, today they are often
seen as places of resistance to centralized authority and harbingers of reform and democracy. They can also be seen as a more adequate structural base to accommodate
ethnic or economic differences. There are many definitions of what constitutes a region in the literature, but the lowest common denominator is that it is a territory or
an area in some way demarcated or at least spatially defined.24 Today, the category
is utilized for territorial expanses of different sizes, and regions are studied as both
subnational entities and supranational formations. In todays increasingly interdependent world (defined by some as globalization) certain regions may supersede the
nation-state, or at least attempt to do so. Such is the ongoing experiment with the
European Union, primarily an economic unit but with growing political and cultural ambitions, which symbolically appropriated the name of the larger geographic
region: Europe. The project Europa was, in fact, the major impetus to the accumulation of a vast body of literature on regions and regionalism.
Some scholars, in an effort to move beyond the territorial tautology, point out
that in order to be marked from the outside world, regions have to possess some internal
similarities, cohesion, and affinity.25 Europe can be approached as the component of
197
different intersecting regional formations, of which the geography is but one aspect
(and not always the most important): the region of Western Christianity; of contact
and complex historical interplay between the three monotheistic world religions
(Christianity, Islam, Judaism); of nations; the core-region of world colonization and
industrialization. Numerous other definitions might be applied within the framework
of different disciplines or approaches. Historians in particular are crucified between
two poles: Marc Blochs position that French history does not exist, there is only European history, against a position of well-argued skepticism that European history
could ever be approached holistically in any methodologically convincing way.26
Eastern Europe should not simply be identified as a territorial subregion of
Europe, though this often happensand neither should Southeastern Europe or
the Balkans be treated as subregions of the subregion. As territorial subregions, they
are locked in a hierarchical matrix where they become, to utilize some Jakobsonian
terminology, marked categories.27 As an example of the complex notion of Europe,
at American universities there are numerous departments of European studies. There
is also, and usually not as an integral part of European studies, the field of East
European studies. To this day, American universities as a rule advertise separate
positions for East Europeanists. If a general position in European history is opened,
it is usually specified as British, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, even
Irish history, while Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serb, Croatian,
Macedonian, Latvian, Estonian, Albanian, and other national histories are subsumed
under the umbrella of East European history. Eastern European, then, is a marked
category as a subfield of European history. Central European, or rather East
Central European, and Southeast European history and literature occasionally
emerge as marked subcategories within this marked subfield. The rest of Europe,
however, is not represented by commensurate categories and the appropriate specialists on Northeastern Europe, West Central Europe, nor even Western Europe. These are, then, unmarked categories. Marked categories become different
while unmarked categories retain power as the standard against which the rest must
be positioned. In the case of Europe, this central notion is implicitly hierarchical,
as Europe forms the nexus of several complex networks of meaning in which it plays
quite different and far from commensurate roles: the role of geographic area but
also those of economic and administrative powerhouse, of historical and intellectual idea, and, increasingly, of an ideal.
Since differentiation or disentanglement of entities takes place at the edge, for a
long time borders were the preferred object of analysis, especially in examinations of
identity and when defining regions. Identity and alterity (otherness) clearly exist in a
symbiotic relationship, and their most sharply defined characteristics are best articulated at this border encounter. Consequently, otherness became a fundamental category of both social experience and social analysis, and it has made a powerful inroad
in historical studies. Borders, however, turned out to be a problematic first choice.
They are unstable and can be defined by a number of different criteria. More importantly, the excessive focus on borders imposed an unhealthy obsession with distinction
and difference. Recently, there has been a powerful shift away from border studies
toward the now-fashionable category of space, which allots due attention to the
cohesive processes and structures within the entity. This approach, developed by
geographers and anthropologists, stresses the links between knowledge, power, and
spatiality and focuses on the metaphorical and material resonance of space.28 While
this theory has produced valuable works, it also has its dangers. Space is oftentimes
uncritically linked to ethnicity or nation, and this either unintentionally replicates
statist and nationalist claims under the guise of a new scholarly jargon, or produces
static and ahistoric structural analyses.
It is against this background that I introduce the notion of historical legacy,
which focuses attention on the element of time in order to answer a misleadingly
simple question: What is a region? Historical legacy retains the valuable features of
spatiality while simultaneously refining the vector of time, making it more historically specific. After all, as observed in the popular play about the Cold War, A Walk
in the Woods, history is only geography stretched over time.29 Any region can be
approached as the complex result of the interplay of numerous historical periods,
traditions, and legacies; and of these categories, historical periods are the most
straightforward. They delineate a length of time with some internal consistency and
a more or less well-established beginning and end, based most often on (a cluster of)
meaningful events.
Tradition and legacy are less straightforward. Raymond Williams observed that
tradition in its most general modern sense is a particularly difficult word.30 Of its
manifold meanings throughout the centuries, the general process of handing down
knowledge and ideas survived, and was soon linked to the idea of respect and duty to
the forebears. We have in this popular understanding of tradition several components:
an active attitude, a conscious selection, and an evaluative elevation of elements created in an accumulative process of handing down. Legacy is a broadly used word, but
it has not entered the specialized vocabulary of historians or other social scientists
(barring the legal profession). Alongside its legal use (as a bequest), it is very similar to
tradition: both designate the processes (and artifacts) of handing down. Yet, while tradition involves a conscious selection of elements bequeathed from the past, legacy
encompasses everythingchosen or notthat is handed down from the past. In this
sense, legacy neither betrays the past nor surrenders it to active meddling. Legacy may
be exalted or maligned by successors, but this comes as a secondary process. Legacy as
an abstract signifier is neutral. It is, then, my choice to make historical legacy the
receptacle of a meaning on which I will elaborate below.
For purely cognitive purposes I distinguish between legacy as continuity and
legacy as perception. Legacy as continuity is the survival (and gradual decline) of some
of the characteristics of the entity immediately before its collapse. Legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the articulation and rearticulation of how the entity is thought
about at different times by different individuals or groups. These should not be interpreted as real versus imagined characteristics: the characteristics of continuity are
themselves often perceptual, and perceptions are no less a matter of continuous real
social facts. In both cases, the categories designate social facts, which are at different
removes from experience; but in the instance of perception, the social fact is removed
yet a further step from immediate reality.
Let me provide two concrete examples from the Balkans and Eastern Europe
to illustrate each type of legacy. If we look at the numerous historical periods, traditions, and legacies that shape Southeastern Europe, some periods and legacies
199
overlap and others are completely segregated;31 some have played themselves out
in the same geographic space while others have involved different macroregions of
southeast Europe.32 These periods and legacies can also be classified according to
their influence in different spheres of social life, such as political, economic, demographic, or cultural. In the religious sphere, one can single out the Christian,
Muslim, and Judaic traditions, along with their numerous sects and branches. In the
sphere of art and culture, there are the legacies of the pre-Greeks, the Greeks, and
numerous ethnic groups that settled the peninsula. In social and demographic terms,
we have the legacies of large and incessant migrations, ethnic diversity, seminomadism,
a large egalitarian agricultural sphere, and late urbanization alongside a constant
continuity of urban life.
Of the political legacies that have shaped the southeast European peninsula as a
whole (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and communist), two can be singled out as crucial before the nineteenth century. One is the Byzantine millennium, with its profound political, institutional, legal, religious, and cultural impact. The other is the
half millennium of Ottoman rule that gave the peninsula its name and established its
longest period of political unity. The Ottoman elementsor those perceived as such
have contributed to most current Balkan stereotypes. In the narrow sense of the word,
then, one can argue that the Balkans are, in fact, the Ottoman legacy.
This legacy is different from the Ottoman polity or the Ottoman period; it is a
process that began after the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, and is the aggregate of
characteristics handed down chiefly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I have attempted a systematic review of the workings of the Ottoman legacy as continuity in the political, cultural, social, and economic spheres where it displayed
different degrees of perseverance. In practically all spheres, the break began almost
immediately after the onset of political independence in the separate Balkan states
and, as a whole, was completed by the end of World War I; in the realms of demography and popular culture, however, the Ottoman legacy continued for some time
and was gradually transformed into the influence of the Turkish nation-state. After
World War I, the Ottoman legacy as perception became the process of interaction
of an ever-evolving and accumulating past with ever-evolving and accumulating
perceptions of generations of people who are redefining the past. This legacy is not
a reconstruction, but rather a construction of the past in works of historiography,
fiction, journalism, and everyday discourse. The legacy as perception is one of the
most important pillars in the discourse of Balkan nationalism and displays striking
similarities in all Balkan countries. The Ottoman legacy is at the center of securing
present social arrangements, above all legitimizing the state; and it is bound to be
reproduced for some time to come.
The countries defined as Balkan (i.e. those in the historical Ottoman sphere) have
been moving steadily away from their Ottoman legacy, and with this also from their
balkanness. I want to strongly emphasize here that this statement is devoid of any
evaluative element. I argue that what we are witnessing today in the geographic
Balkansnamely, the eradication of the final vestiges of a historical legacy of ethnic
multiplicity and coexistence,33 and its replacement by institutionalized ethnically
homogeneous bodiesmay well be an advanced stage of the final Europeanization
of the region, and the end of the historic Balkans and the Ottoman legacy.
CONCLUSION: BLACK AND JEW
The Two Racisms

Throughout this study we have tended to examine anti-black and
anti-Semitic racism as if they constituted two quite discrete strands, which
might suggest that individuals or groups located in one time and place
would focus their prejudice almost uniquely on Jews (with little concern
for blacks), and in other instances primarily on blacks (with little place
for anti-Semitism). Historically, it can be argued that such a crude division makes some sense as shown in the European map of racisms, in the
division between maritime colonial or ex-colonial states of the West, and
the landlocked nations of Central and Eastern Europe that contained
the demographic core of the Jewish people. However, such a perspective overlooks the complex and crucial interrelationship between racisms
at the individual level, the fact that each person will be socialized into a
world which may offer not one, but a whole range of potential outsiders
or minorities as objects of dislike. Social psychologists have demonstrated that individuals (as well as the group to which they belong) tend
to maintain a hierarchy of race, in which, for example, black Africans
may be placed on the bottom rung, perceived in terms of the most negative
characteristics, followed in a sequence by other groups that are positioned
ever further up the ladder as they approach the most perfect human
type represented by the white European subject or in-group. If the
individual is usually prejudiced towards a range of Others, what are the
factors which generate greater hostility towards some groups rather
than others?
If racisms are historically located, determined by specific contexts,
then it is to be expected that they will alter through time and that the
hierarchy of race, the ranking order, will also undergo change. It
might, for example, be predicted that an inter-war hierarchy in which
hatred of Jews predominated over the relative lack of concern over
209
210
Racism in Europe, 18702000
blacks, would be reversed post-1945 as large-scale colonial immigration

took off. Or that political conflict in the Middle East, the perceived rise of
an Islamic threat, and a growing Muslim presence inside Europe, would
generate a more recent anti-Arab racism. Racial stereotypes do not, at
the level of the individual psyche, exist as separate or discrete strands,
but interrelate within a field. How and why individuals or groups focus
their animus at a given moment against one minority rather than
another, and how this can also be switched, provides an insight into the
dynamics of racism.
An excellent opportunity to investigate the interrelationship between
racisms is provided by the role of anti-black and anti-Semitic racism in
contemporary extreme right-wing movements. 1 As has been noted
(Chapter 7), the last quarter of the twentieth century saw the growth of
far-right political parties in Western Europe that sought power through
establishing a mass electoral base, a strategy that could only be effective if
they dissociated themselves from the old Nazi or fascist traditions or acts
of overt violence. Some parties, like the French Front National, have
indeed achieved widespread legitimacy and electoral success through,
for example, a shift to cultural racism. It may seem to be contradictory
to such purposes, and rather surprising, that the FN, as well as other
parties like the British National Front, should retain a core ideology of
traditional anti-Semitism. Such respectable racist parties operate at two
levels: at the open surface level the entire message, directed at potential
voters, sympathizers and ordinary members is aimed against blacks and
immigrants; at a concealed level aimed at an inner core of militants or
party activists, the key message is based on anti-Semitism. Party leaders
therefore consciously manipulate a field of prejudice in which a dynamic
relationship exists between the two racisms.
Why the allegiance to anti-Semitism in a political context in which it
might seem to be counterproductive, alienating rather than winning
over voters? Part of the answer can be found in the fact that the generation
of far-right leaders that pioneered the shift after 1970 towards nationalpopulism and an anti-immigrant politics, men like Le Pen, John Tyndall,
Franz Schnhuber and Jrg Heider, had received their political education
and ideological formation after 1945 within the ranks of overtly Nazi
and anti-Semitic movements. Anti-black racism presented a case of electoral
opportunism that did not fundamentally displace the core anti-Semitic
values. Secondly, such leaders have constructed a New Racist discourse
that enables coded anti-Semitic messages to be conveyed to the initiated,
the party hard-line militants, while remaining opaque to a wider public
Conclusion: Black and Jew
211
who might otherwise be alienated. For example, the British NF in the

1970s claimed not to be anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist, while the FN
through the use of coded terms, like cosmopolitanism, mondialiste,
rootless or nomadic people, usury, international finance and so on,
was able to construct anti-Semitic messages without once referring
specifically to Jews. Such coding has served as a public signal, from the
leadership to militants and an inner coterie of old-guard neo-Nazis,
who frequently showed opposition to the electoral strategy and the
apparent ditching of traditional ideology, that the core values did
indeed remain intact. Coding and ambiguity sometimes appears to have
gone wrong and to have backfired, as when Le Pen caused widespread
scandal through his hinted support for the Holocaust denial (the genocide,
he said, was a mere detail of the Second World War) or his punning
reference to the Jewish minister Durafour in terms of Durafourcrmatoire, four meaning oven in French, hence four crmatoire for the Nazi
gas ovens. But such gaffes may also have been quite deliberate, part of
a wider revisionist strategy to reintroduce or normalize anti-Semitism,
which would at the same time appease hard-liners, and to create a legitimate and acceptable image of Nazism and of Hitler through ridiculing
the Holocaust or persuading the public that it never took place.
However, none of this explains why contemporary racists have
remained so doggedly attached to anti-Semitism: such durability and
resilience derives from the powerful ideological structures and political
benefits of the stereotype, in particular as a brand of conspiracy theory.
The racial stereotype of the black, deriving both from colonial conquest
and slavery, is of a race far inferior to the white European in innate
intelligence, incapable of invention or rising to civilized standards without
assistance, lazy, dirty, driven more by animal instincts (violence and
uncontrolled sexuality) than by reason, and prone to revert to a primitive
state characterized by paganism, the jungle, the mud-hut and cannibalism.
The problem with a post-war politics grounded on the threat of black
immigration was how to explain the fact that such an inherently inferior
race, an inferiority that it would be beyond any educational programme
or social improvement to alter, could offer any kind of challenge to white
supremacy. The contradiction was resolved through anti-Semitism: the
black, stupid and inferior did not present a fundamental threat, this
came far more from the Jew, who represented intelligence and a high
level of organization.
Frequently, racism has been defined as a system of belief that invariably
assumes the genetic or cultural inferiority of the oppressed group: however,
212
anti-Semitism is far more ambiguous in that it credits the Jews with

superior qualities such as cleverness, strict moral standards, powerful
group solidarity, energy, strong will and high levels of achievement. For
Hitler, who recognized the Jew as the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan
with an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species, the greater
the diabolic cunning and power of the enemy, the deeper the level of
anxiety and paranoia, and the sense of a desperate and final struggle for
German survival.2 Since the gravest of all threats to the Aryans stemmed
from racial mixing with lower types and from degeneration, it was the
Jews (who upheld their own racial purity and strength through strict
racial endogamy) who procured this end through the deliberate introduction of blacks and interbreeding. The inferior blacks were thus an
instrument of a malevolent Jewish conspiracy. At the same time, Jews
were portrayed by the Nazis as effeminate and physically degenerate.
A 1935 Nazi sports manual by Kurt Mnch noted: Among the inferior
races the Jews have done nothing in the athletic sphere. They are surpassed
even by the lowest of the negro tribes. In the same year the racist propagandist Julius Streicher, incensed by the repeated victories of the black
wrestler, Jim Wango, over white German contestants, interceded to halt
a match in Nuremberg. The humiliation of defeat by a racial primitive
was countered through the notion of Jewish subversion, a sequence
of matches organized by the Jewish promoter Zurth: What we oppose
is the linking of sport with dirty business interests and sales gimmicks. It
is a sales gimmick, an appeal to inferior people, to subhumans, to put
a negro on view and let him compete with white people. It is not in
the spirit of the inhabitants of Nuremberg to let white men be subdued
by a black man. 3
This type of thinking or formulation, the Jews as an evil manipulator
of a race war, can be found quite consistently in contemporary antiSemitism. In 1990 an FN leader, Georges-Paul Wagner, denounced the
perils of mondialisme and cosmopolitanism (i.e. the Jews), which favoured
lowering barriers to immigration so as to undermine and weaken the
French people from within. The 1993 FN election programme 300 Steps
for the Rebirth of France denounced the mondialiste doctrine which usually
dressed up as the rights of man, preaches the destruction of nations, the
abolition of frontiers, mixing of races, cultures and peoples.4 Similarly,
the British NF journal Spearhead accused Jewish conspirators of promoting
multiculturalism in order to achieve universal genocide by race-mixing,
a strategy for eventual world domination that would be achieved by
retaining Jewish racial purity. It must be recognized that immigration
213
into this country is not simply some economically determined accident,

but consciously permitted as a calculated act of genocide against the
British people. 5 A favourite metaphor or image in European far-right
propaganda, especially in cartoons, is that of Jews as puppeteers, concealed
from the audience, pulling the strings of black dolls. In a typical FN
cartoon one black puppet, in a line of similar faces, complains, But I
dont want to vote, while behind him a hook-nosed man with thick lips
says, Youll do what I tell you to do. 6 The British NF Spearhead frequently
claimed that Jews fomented race wars in the USA or Britain, destructive
conflicts that undermined states: The real enemy meanwhile smilingly
sits upstairs, pulls all the strings and calls the tune to which both parties
dance. Such a logic determined the racial hierarchy and the real political
agenda concealed from the wider electorate: if Britain were to become
Jew-clean she would have no nigger neighbours to worry about. 7
The idea of racial manipulation of naive blacks by cunning Jews is just
one small part of a much wider structure of anti-Semitic ideology
founded on a conspiracy theory and what Richard Hofstadter has called
the paranoid style of politics. 8 Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, although
it may appear bizarre and irrational to the uninitiated, provides a very
powerful and seductive framework for understanding and interpreting
the world. Typically, important events and the huge, complex forces
that underlie them (the Cold War, capitalism, Communism, economic
crisis, international conflict, growing crime, moral decline and so on)
can be reduced to a simple cause. Supporters or members of extremeright political movements, who suffer from high levels of insecurity and
anxiety, are provided with a framework for understanding a chaotic and
fast-changing world that seems at times overwhelming and out of control. At times of economic, social and political crisis and disorientation,
like that facing contemporary Russia, conspiracy theory and populist,
xenophobic nationalism offer a strong appeal to ordinary people. The
demagogue and propagandist, from Le Pen to Zhirinovsky, offers
simple solutions to complex issues. For ordinary Russians, the penetration of capitalism, of market relations and foreign multinationals has
been, in part, a real cause of growing mass unemployment, hyper-inflation
and extreme poverty: such insidious processes are readily presented in
terms of American finance, and behind that, the evil machinations of
rich and powerful cosmopolitans. A further attraction of conspiracy
theory is that it provides a fail-safe mechanism to resolve any contradictions
and to provide proof in the absence of evidence. For example, a lack of
public or demonstrable evidence about Jewish conspiratorial activities
214
can be ascribed to the diabolic cunning with which they operate. The
very absence of an exposure of Jewish conspiratorial power by the press,
cinema and television is itself taken as proof of the extent to which Jews
own or control the media and suppress the truth. Finally, the prevalence
of a conspiracy theory helps explain why it is that powerful currents of
anti-Semitism can exist even in regions or states where there is an almost
total absence of Jews. A 1992 survey found that 10 per cent of Poles
thought there were 4 to 7 million Jews in the country; 25 per cent put
the number at 750 000 to 3.5 million, while the true number was 6000,
so few that most Poles would have no contact whatsoever with Jews.
However, even if the numbers are shown to be objectively small, this is
of no consequence to the anti-Semite since for them Jews wield such
immense individual power as financiers, government ministers or press
barons that numbers are immaterial to the threat they pose.
Contemporary New Right movements and respectable racist parties
appear to break the links to an older tradition of fascism and to swing
over to an anti-immigrant politics, but in reality the rupture often takes
place only at the surface. The failure to jettison anti-Semitism stems in
part from the considerable explanatory power of the racial ideology. No
attempt appears to have been made by the extreme right to modernize
racial doctrine by developing a theory in which blacks, Asians or any
other group take on a similar function to the Jews, apart from a recent
tendency to portray oil-rich Arabs and Islamic fundamentalists in terms
of powerful and global conspiratorial forces. When black immigration is
presented as a danger, it is not in terms of a threatening, intelligent competitor, but rather of crude numbers, a primitive breeding-power that
will simply swamp and displace the white-man in his own country.
It might be objected that such ideological constructions of anti-black
and anti-Semitic racism, while demonstrating how two modalities might
interrelate or be placed in a hierarchy, remains quite untypical, confined
to an inner core of activists. This is indeed the case, and the anomaly of
extreme-right parties is that, through their overt anti-immigrant stance,
they have had a much bigger impact on generating a popular anti-black
racism than anti-Semitism. However, it can be argued that racial conspiracy theory has historic roots in contrasting anti-black and anti-Semitic
traditions and stereotypes that can be found almost universally within
European culture. Although there has been a relative lack of contemporary research into hierarchies of race at the individual level, there does
exist an interesting body of investigation by American social psychologists
carried out immediately after the Second World War, in particular by
215
Adorno, Horkheimer, Bettelheim and Allport. Bruno Bettelheim and

Morris Janowitz, through in-depth interviews of 150 ex-servicemen
from Chicago, set out to establish the relationship between anti-Semitic
and anti-Negro prejudice.9 In general this, and similar investigations,
found that the two kinds of stereotype were made up of quite different,
almost reciprocal sets of characteristics presenting a more or less integrated pattern. Jews were perceived to have the following traits:
Controlling everything through the power of money, shrewd, mercenary, industrious, grasping, intelligent, ambitious, sly and clannish
(refusal to intermarry, a closed-in group).
Blacks were perceived quite differently as:
Of low intelligence, ignorant, lazy and slackers at work, dirty, carriers
of disease, sexually promiscuous, immoral, emotionally unstable,
given to crimes of violence with razors and knives, fondness for
gambling, inability to save, superstitious, flashy in dress.10
Whether we accept the basically psychoanalytic approach of this American
school or not, the research demonstrated that anti-black and anti-Semitic
stereotypes, each one of them consisting of an interlocking pattern of
characteristics, were universally present within US society at the individual
level. In Bettelheims sample almost all the ex-servicemen were in varying degrees prejudiced towards both groups. Only nine out of 150 were
tolerant towards both Jews and blacks, and as the measure of the intensity
of individual intolerance increased in scale towards Jews, so it also
increased towards blacks. The more extreme the individual racist, the
greater the hatred directed towards all minorities. Within any given historic
context, any particular European society at a particular moment in time,
one minority group may have been much more intensely disliked than
another, to which a lesser degree of antipathy attached. What is of
considerable interest to the history of racisms would be to track, through
a long period of time, the processes that might lead a dominant prejudice to weaken and be superseded or displaced by a minor. One way of
viewing this is to regard each individual as entertaining a whole complex
of racial stereotypes, usually placed in a hierarchy, and that these modalities constitute a latent resource, a kind of wardrobe or kit of racial types,
that can be called upon or activated within a specific historical context or
conjuncture of events.
216
During the period under review (18702000) the image of the moneygrasping, cunning, intelligent and conspiratorial Jew, as opposed to the
sexually libidinous, lazy, primitive and unintelligent black, was diffused
not only among an educated middle class, but among all Europeans.
The origin of these powerful racial stereotypes was rooted in two distinct
developments, one in the history of European expansion, the conquest
of Africa, the slave system and colonialism, the other in an even older
millennial tradition of Christian persecution of a deicide minority.
Until the end of the Second World War, anti-Semitism tended, throughout Western and Eastern Europe, to carry a greater psychic intensity, or
level of anxiety and fear, since the Jew was both an intelligence, as well as
lodged inside. The black, apart from the crucial experience within the
terrain of white colonial societies, was for most Europeans a far more
exotic, distant and external primitive that offered no real threat until he,
too, migrated and in turn became an insider. This is not to say that the
stereotypes were somehow the cause of racism, or that they remained
fossilized or unchanging in form. Rather, the stereotypes may be seen as
latent, diffuse and generalized within European culture, a dangerous
resource that could be called upon or mobilized according to the specific social and political moment. For the peasantry of inter-war Central
and Eastern Europe, the patterns of prejudice towards Jews were highly
activated, but the same individuals would also have carried negative
anti-black stereotypes that were diffused within popular culture through
nursery rhymes, mission sermons and Hollywood films. The rapidity
with which an anti-black moral panic was generated in the 1920s in
response to the presence of black French troops in the Rhineland is a
testament to the latent power of stereotypes, even within a society in
which the great majority had never seen a black person.
During the period from 1870 to 2000 we have also seen that the ideological formulations of the underlying patterns of prejudice can alter dramatically through time. From 1870 to c.1945 the rise of biological racism
was a reflection of an age in which scientific explanation of difference
carried enormous prestige and legitimating authority. After 1945 the
educated public came to see the roots of difference in terms of social and
cultural formations, an anti-racist perspective to which the New Racism
riposted by making cultural barriers absolute. Groups were naturally
and inexorably locked into separate compartments, different age-old cultures, that multiculturalism could only devastate. Mixaphobia, whether of
intermarriage and degeneration or of cultural bastardization and hybridization, showed an underlying continuity across the twentieth century.

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Introduction to European Studies

Senior Lecturer Dr. Dan D. Lazea

1. Non-European origins of Europe

The identity of Europe has always been uncertain and imprecise, a

story of Europa, daughter of Agenor, king of the city of Tyre on the

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 86.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

confidently declare that being a Hellene was no longer a matter of blood

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 129.

Lectures on Law: XI Citizens and Aliens, published in 17901, can be found in

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

continent. Edmund Burke, good European that he was, offered an image

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

educated Germans, such as Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote when they

Leibniz, quoted in Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

of Turkish hegemony in the Mediterranean in the late seventeenth century.

Montesquieu, De lesprit des lois, XIX, 14.

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

Orient, she appeared, if only fleetingly, European. When William Pitt,

Donald R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton:

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

As Talal Asad observes in this volume, European history becomes a

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

become, as she appears in Sebastian Munsters

Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent

I shall try to give some answers to the questions What is Europe? or

certain complex of human cultures and human histories constructed by

Some Europes in Their History

Some Europes in Their History

presumption that continents must be situated in the ocean. But we have

The conquest produced a double separation of Europe from the

Some Europes in Their History

eastward at the expense of Slavic and Finno-Ugrian peoples, beyond

1989 suggests that wewhoever we arewould rather not have to

Some Europes in Their History

This was a history of feudal as well as clerical power. The Crusades

Some Europes in Their History

European economic community, in fact, but one composed of states whose

which I quoted earlier, is the major response of Enlightened historiography

Some Europes in Their History

the Turkish empire, seen as barbaric, oriental, decadent, and on the

Some Europes in Their History

arbitrarytoward the old Heartland where Catholic-ProtestantEnlightened Europe shadesintoOrthodox-Muslim-Communist Eurasia,

We have considered two eras in which Europe was defined as a largely

which the incident at Antioch could be perceived retrospectively as the

originally sketched out in the concluding part of Agrarverhaltnisse

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

Altertum. In Die Stadt he makes the famous distinction between the

For the purpose of this particular comparison, the medieval city

was represented by the type of the artisanal inland city (burgerliche

E&S 1353f. = WuG 805.

ASAC 358 = SWG 271.

Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

public festivals, are viewed unfavorably by Weber, since in his opinion

I have deliberately stressed certain lacunae of Webers account and some

18 E&S 1360 = WuG 809.

Oldenbourg, 1996), 22547.

Stephen Kalberg, Cultural Foundations of Modern Citizenship, in Bryan S. Turner,

The Kantian Idea of Europe