Building on the process of Franco-German reconciliation, a nucleus of committed states and leaders was soon engaged in a movement of radical return, embracing a set of "European values" such as the respect for individual rights, a preference for consensual politics, a scepticism about the unrestrained market, a preference for diplomacy over force, and an identity that might be called rooted cosmopolitanism -national, yes, but multi-and trans-as well. In the remarkable alchemy of memory, it was only after 1945, the story now went, that Europe at last became genuinely European.
How does one write a history of a place defined in large part by a wilful misperception of its own past? The answer depends on where you believe the past begins, and on the vantage point from which you are viewing it. G. D. H. and M.
I. Cole's The Intelligent Man's Review of Europe To-Day (1933) understood Europe's modern history as a struggle between nationalism and internationalism - the former as a response to economic deprivation and imperialism, the latter as a hopeful, but probably ineffective, antidote.
Two decades later, a massive multi-author project led by Max Beloff, Pierre Renouvin, Franz Schnabel and Franco Valsecchi understood European history to be simply the past of the European continent, a continent that extended only as far as the ideological boundary produced by the post-war order. The result, the multivolume L'Europe du XIXe et du XXe siecle (1959-67), attempted to marry studies of geography and culture with discrete national histories, and then to combine both with reflections on Europe's place in the world. But the unmistakable subtext is that the war was still too close: old habits could not be shaken. It was thus possible for the authors, with a straight face, to write of the essential "racial homogeneity of Europeans" as a source of continent-wide unity. Had the Nazis been better biologists -seeing Jews as merely a subset of the "meta-race of whites" rather than as a separate, alien group -all the unpleasantness could have been avoided.
By the 1970s, the main narrative had become decline: a Europe of reduced ambitions, rickety economies, a nuclear problem, and little control over its own fate. For James Joll, in his Europe Since 1870 (1973), the continent was an arena in which, over the previous century, two games had been played out: one, the search for a balance of power among the continent's major players; another, the competition for dominance among Liberalism, Imperialism, Fascism, Socialism and Communism. Neither game, in Joll's view, was finished, although the major participants were now the United States and the Soviet Union.
Today, it is the variegated nature of Europe, not its grand themes, that attracts attention.
Norman Davies, in Europe: A history (1996), took the very long view, beginning with the ebb and flow of what (and where) Europe was in antiquity, and ending with a continent marginally less divided than in centuries past. Mark Mazower, in his marvellous Dark Continent (1998), provided a strikingly negative -in the photographic sense -portrait of Europe by sketching the real array of values that seemed to define Europeanness in the twentieth century: the overbearing power of the State, a scepticism about the workings of democracy, an uncritical loyalty to nation and tribe. Richard Vinen took things one step further. His History in Fragments (2000) abjured any grand narrative at all, rejecting even the standard periodization for the past century -pre-war, inter-war, post-war -and pulling away from high politics to probe the recesses of social history.
Another way of approaching Europe is to chart the uses of history as a lever against the past, to examine the continent's struggle to tell a story about itself that camouflages its own self- invention. This is Tony Judt's method in his elegant and provocative Postwar, a genuinely magisterial account of Europe's encounters with itself. Part of modern Europe's history involves the withering of the old grand ideological narratives, of both Right and Left, and, in the space left behind, the growth of a new story about the development of a uniquely "European model" of politics, economics and social relations. But this Europe, Judt points out, was not the product of vision and optimism but rather "the insecure child of anxiety", congenitally nervous about the forces and failings that had enabled the massive destruction of the Second World War.
