The New Old World (86 page)

This volcanic text, alternatively ecstatic and ironic, was too incendiary for print in Novalis's lifetime. Goethe, when consulted, quashed its publication in the
Athenaeum
, and even when it finally saw the light of day in 1826, his fellow Romantics Tieck and Schlegel, who had suppressed it for a quarter of a century, treated it as a ‘divisive' error that was better ignored—a discomfort still in a sense more perceptive than its later reception as an exalted piece of politico-religious reaction.
⁴⁰
Schlegel, instrumental in censoring his friend's manifesto, moved to Paris in 1802, where he started a new journal,
Europa
—by then, a far from popular rubric—in which he began to develop a theme that would have a longer future before it than the vision of European renewal from a Christianity transformed by the French Revolution. In its first editorial, he explained that it would deal with ‘the
greatest diversity of topics', and in his first substantial essay in it, recounting his trip from Germany to Paris, he observed that while for the crowd there appeared, unquestionably, a ‘European sameness', for a more discerning eye there remained significant differences between nations, and there it had to be admitted that the French had the advantage over the Germans, as closer in character and way of life to the spirit of the times. In that sense, Paris could be held the capital of the universe, and the revolution it had undertaken regarded as a welcome experiment, all the more interesting for the resistance of the material on which it was being exercised. But Northern and Southern Europe as a whole consisted of two radically different kinds of society, and their contrast was constitutive. ‘What in the Orient springs from its origin with undivided force into a single form, is here divided into a manifold and unfolded with greater art. The human spirit must here decompose, dissolve its powers into infinity, and so become capable of much it would otherwise never attain'. Still, if its telluric powers—the iron force of the north and glowing embers of the south—could be harmonized, a truer Europe might yet emerge.
⁴¹
Schlegel never quite lost the nostalgia for unity of the
Frühromantik
, which in his later work would find expression in recurrent claims for the superior wisdom of the East, but the critical theme would remain diversity. In 1810, by then a sworn enemy of the revolution, he told the audience of his lectures on modern history: ‘Asia, one could say, is the land of unity, in which everything unfolds in great masses, and in the simplest relations; Europe is the land of freedom, that is, of civilization [
Bildung
] through the contest of manifold individual and isolated energies … It is precisely this rich variety, this manifoldness, that makes Europe what it is, that confers on it the distinction of being the chief seat of all human life and civilization'.
⁴²

By the time this was written, Schlegel had moved to Vienna, where he was rapidly integrated into the Habsburg establishment, working first for the Austrian general staff and later on schemes for a post-Napoleonic order in Germany. It was in this milieu that the second leading theme of conservative thinking about Europe, the shift away from balance-of-power principles as understood in pre-revolutionary diplomacy, took shape during the struggle
against Napoleon. Gentz, translator of Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France
before becoming Metternich's aide and secretary to the Congress of Vienna, can be taken as a conduit of the change. His first public interventions, in the time of the Consulate, while defending in more or less conventional terms the balance of power since Westphalia, as a system so organized that ‘every weight in the political mass would find somewhere a counter-weight', had argued that more than this was required if Europe was to acquire its appropriate federal constitition. Beyond such checks and balances, positive mutuality between the powers was needed, and this must include the right to intervene in the affairs of any state that threatened the international order, as a principle of public law.
⁴³
With the Restoration, the corollary became the axiom. The political system set in place at the Congress of Vienna, of which Metternich could regard himself as the chief guardian, if not architect, and Gentz as the theorist, was not a re-edition of the balance of power of the eighteenth century. It was a fundamentally novel one—a system not of competition, but coordination between the leading powers, to stabilize the restoration of the old order and crush any danger of revolutionary risings against it.
⁴⁴
For its creators, this was no mere cartel of the
anciens régimes
, but the realization of a new kind of continental unity—the Concert of Europe. Metternich, who regarded himself as ‘representing European society as a whole', could write to Wellington in 1824: ‘Depuis longtemps l'Europe a pris pour moi la valeur d'une patrie'. A century later Kissinger would call him the ‘Prime Minister of Europe'.
⁴⁵

In France, Guizot was no less committed to the Concert of Europe, and would become a fellow victim of the revolutions of 1848, when both rulers were toppled. But his intellectual achievement in the same cause was of another order: a historical synthesis weaving the two conservative motifs of unity and variety into a full-blown narrative of the destiny of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Restoration, in which pride of place was given to a ‘prodigious diversity' as the very definition of the unity of European civilization, incomparably richer than any other. Distinctive in this vision was the—prudently—agonistic touch Guizot gave to the trope of variety that had been foregrounded by Schlegel. Europe was not just the theatre of an astonishing diversity of political systems, social structures, intellectual doctrines and aesthetic forms, but these were in ‘a state of continual conflict', and this was the source of the vitality of European civilization.
⁴⁶
From the collision and combination of Roman, Christian and Barbarian elements had emerged the rudiments of the mediaeval order. Out of the struggles between the nobility, the church and the commons had developed the unity of nations, annealed only by monarchy—not aristocracy, theocracy nor any republic—into the form of the modern state. Out of the Reformation, as an insurrection of the freedom of thought against the absolute spiritual power of the papacy, had come the clash between that free spirit and centralized monarchy in seventeenth-century England, the land that was a veritable concentrate of all the successive diversities of European history.

Finally, out of the conflict in France between a still purer version of absolute monarchy and a yet more radical free spirit, had arisen the revolution of 1789. That, however, had been a too absolute triumph of human reason, leading to a tyranny of its own, now happily a thing of the past. For ‘it is the duty, and, I believe, will be the merit of our time, to recognize that any power'—be it spiritual or temporal—‘contains within it a natural vice, a principle of weakness and abuse requiring that a limit be assigned to it'.
⁴⁷
Conflictivity, salutary as it was, must also be wisely contained. Its natural outcome in Europe was compromise. For if ‘diverse forces are in continual conflict with one another, none can succeed in suppressing the others and taking entire possession of society'.
⁴⁸
Guizot gave his lectures on the general history of European civilization in 1828, on the eve of the July Monarchy, in which he would put the principles of the
juste milieu
into practice. As a French Protestant, he had inverted the schema of Saint-Simon and the German Romantics to make of the Reformation an emancipation rather than regression, and adjusted the principles of the Restoration from the absolutist reflexes of Vienna to the constitutional maxims of Paris, detaching them from legitimism. But the unity-in-diversity of Europe was no less the work of divine providence in this Huguenot edition, still bearing the stamp of a conservatism, however liberal in intention, for which the French were not grateful.
⁴⁹

Across the Rhine, similar ideas soon found expression. Five years later, the young Leopold von Ranke, a friend of Gentz in Vienna, while maintaining that ‘the complex of Christian nations in Europe should be considered as a whole, so to speak as a single state', was also telling his German readers that ‘out of the clash of opposing forces, in great moments of danger—disaster, rising, rescue—the most decisive new developments are born'. It
was a mistake to think that the nineteenth century had done no more than shed the baleful heritage of the French Revolution: it had ‘also renewed the fundamental principle of all states, that is religion and law, and given new life to the principle of each individual state'. Indeed, just as ‘there would only be a disagreeable monotony if the different literatures let their individual characters be blended and melted together'—for ‘the union of all must rest upon the independence of each, so that they can stimulate one another'—so it was ‘the same with states and nations. Conclusive, positive predominance of any one would inflict ruin on others. A mixture of all would destroy the essence of each. Out of their separation and self-development will emerge true harmony'.
⁵⁰
Ranke, watchful against contagion from the change of regime in France, and writing for a Prussian state that had yet to achieve its full place in the sun, lent a more combative note to common themes, making it clear that the principle of conflict extolled by Guizot in the European past found its classical expression in a field he had generally preferred to forget. War, as Heraclitus had noted, was the father of things. Half a century later, with the achievements of Bismarck before him, Ranke could be still more categorical: ‘Historical development', he wrote in 1881, ‘does not rest on the tendency towards civilization alone. It arises also from impulses of a very different kind, especially from the rivalry of nations engaged in conflict with each other for the possession of soil or for political supremacy. It is in and through this conflict, affecting as it does every domain of culture, that the great empires of history are formed'.
⁵¹

Somewhat earlier, it was Burckhardt, once a student of Ranke, who left the most striking formulations of the passage from the differential through the conflictual to an uncompromising agonistics. From the Renaissance onwards, certainly, Europe had exhibited an ‘unprecedented
variety of life
', where ‘the richest formations originate, home of all contrasts, which dissolve into one unity where everything intellectual is given voice and expression. European is: the self-expression of
all
forces, in monuments, images and words, institutions and parties, down to the individual'. But in this manifold, there was nothing eirenic. Viewed with detachment, ‘the life of the West
is
struggle', and
notwthstanding its ‘great violence' and ‘the desire to annihilate adversaries', Burckhardt held that ‘history should rejoice in this profusion'. For ‘a concealed supreme power here produces epochs, nations and individuals of an endlessly rich particular life'. From the ‘high and distant vantage point' of a historian, the bells of Europe ‘harmonize beautifully, whether or not they seem dissonant nearby:
Discordia concors'
. Only one thing was fatal to Europe: a ‘crushing mechanical power', whether barbarian, absolutist or—today—the levelling pressure of the masses. But from every homogenizing danger, Europe had so far always found men to deliver it.
⁵²

Such, approximately, was the repertoire of ideas stretching from the Enlightenment to the Belle Époque and its aftermath, that could be regarded as the most direct of the ‘sedimentations' conceived by the historian Krzysztof Pomian as latent connexions between successive incarnations of European unity.
⁵³
The First World War, shattering them all in one movement, gave them new life in another, as survivors sought to draw lessons from the catastrophe, and avert any repetition of it. The inter-war period saw a flood of books, articles and schemes for a united Europe—an incomplete inventory counts some six hundred publications in different languages—in which virtually all the topics and tropes of the previous century were recapitulated, selectively or in combination, and the appearance for the first time of organizations expressly devoted to the cause.
⁵⁴
Discursively, perhaps only one new theme gained salience in these years. It was difficult for Europe to regard itself any longer as paramount in the world at large. Decline, possible or actual, of the continent was now commonly discussed, as the growing wealth and power of the United States loomed over every European state, and the rapid development of the USSR and Japan was cause for alarm. Valéry's famous dictum
of 1919, ‘We civilizations now know that we are mortal'—the plural quickly gave way to the singular: other ‘shipwrecks were not our affair'—expressed widespread foreboding.
⁵⁵
A decade later he would drily remark: ‘Europe visibly aspires to be governed by a commission from America. All its politics tend in that direction'.
⁵⁶
Valéry's own observations on the post-war scene, certainly striking enough—lending a pessimistic twist to the tropes both of European diversity, as now capsizing into disorder, and European superiority, as undermined by the very diffusion of its scientific advances—remained within the limits of an ironic
Kulturkritik
, without constructive issue. Other leading philosophical and literary lights of the period—Ortega, Benda, Croce—committed themselves more actively to ideals of European unity.
⁵⁷

Such eddies in the intellectual sphere were not unconnected to the political world. In 1929, official proposals for a European Union were floated through the League of Nations by France, holding public attention into 1931. The evaporation of Briand's initiative, on which he had consulted Coudenhove, owed something to the calculated vagueness of the memorandum he and his aide Alexis Léger—Saint-John Perse—presented to the governments of the time. But if it had little chance of a practical outcome anyway, this was because it essentially represented a premature attempt by France to corral Germany into a system designed to prevent its return to predominance in Europe, as the state with the largest economy and population—the reason why so many hard-boiled politicians in the Third Republic, not just the effusive Briand, but Herriot, Painlevé, even Poincaré, backed a plan that gave the appearance of being all too idealistic. But the First World
War, unlike the Second, had left Germany effectively intact, and Stresemann—Briand's targeted interlocutor—had no intention of renouncing his nation's ambitions to recover the status of a great power. Britain, resistant as later to the idea of European unity as such, especially if it involved any disconnexion from America, invoked the loftier international ideals of the League of Nations to help bury the French initiative as a small-minded substitute. In Paris alone, it was not entirely forgotten. Twenty years later, when France and Germany were each sufficiently humbled by the experience of defeat and occupation to be ready for a more sober union, the Schuman Plan would make a discreet allusion to its predecessor, noting that, then as now, France had set the ball of European unity rolling.