POSTWAR. A history of Europe since 1945. Tony Judt. 878pp. Heinemann. Pounds
25. - 0 434 00749 8.
When the British traveller Henry Barkley loped out of the hills and plains of Anatolia in 1878, dusty from a ride through the eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, he enquired about the amenities to be found in Trebizond, the port on the south-eastern coast of the Black Sea. It was, he hoped, a far cry from the hinterland, being a city where steamers arrived weekly from Marseilles, Odessa and other points to the west, and where a hotchpotch of traders and travellers from across Europe jostled against local Muslims, Greeks and Armenians on the quays. Are there good streets, good houses, good shops and, above all, a good hotel, Barkley asked hopefully. Yes, of course, a local man assured him:
"Trebizond Europa!"
Good streets, good houses, good shops and good hotels: that is still, more than a century later, the view from the periphery -Europe as the civilized terminus of a long, aspirational journey. For Czechs and Poles in 1989, rejoining Europe involved rediscovering a cultural heritage that had been buried beneath the grey moraine of Communism and foreign occupation. For Romanians and Bulgarians today, Europe represents the promise of economic success, and consolidated if still imperfect democracy. For Ukrainians and Georgians, it may eventually become the winch that helps pull their unlikely countries out of Eurasia. For Turks, it has encouraged an unprecedented programme of governmental reform that may one day stretch the European continent across the Bosporus. Trebizond Europa indeed.
But to think of Europe in this way has always required a degree of either conscious self- delusion or blind optimism. In the second half of the twentieth century, Europe as an idea and an ideal, rather than as a place, became a way of addressing a set of perplexing questions about the nature of political and social life on this appendix of western Eurasia. How might a set of diminutive, irascible states provide for their own security and prosperity? How might they bind themselves, Ulysses-like, against the siren calls of nationalism, chauvinism and militarism?
Answering these questions -which became known as the European project -came about less from far-sighted leadership (although that played a role) than from the utter failure of the alternatives. European states had never abided hegemons on their own continent (even as they rushed to become hegemons on others), and any vision of European unity that rested on the dominance of a single state or empire soon prompted counterbalancing by rivals. The traditional system of adversarial balancing could produce unity of a sort, but it was usually short-lived. In the middle of the twentieth century, the devastation of mechanized war cleared the ground to such a degree that the old system of would-be hegemons and counter-alliances became self-evidently unworkable. But envisaging a different future -one that entailed acting, as it were, counter to type -required thinking about what came before in radically new ways: seeing the horror of the first half of Europe's twentieth century not as the logical outcome of its past, but as a long and deadly detour away from the natural norms and behaviour that might yet transform the continent into an arena of peace and cooperation.
Europe could be, in other words, something other than what Europe had done.
This Europe, the "organized and living Europe" that Robert Schuman spoke of in his proposal of May 9, 1950, creating what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community, was conspicuous for one thing: it had never before existed.
As Schuman realized, this Europe would be made, not begotten, crafted "through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity". As time went on, however, the emphasis shifted from making a continent to rediscovering one.
