Introduction
- 2. CONTENTS Introduction 5 I. Challenge to Feudalism(700-1320) 11 Europe as Christendom 1. The Age of Survival (700-1040) 13 2. Christendom Militant (1040-1180) 29 3. Solidarity Loosened (1180-1320) 45 II. Challenge to Catholicism(1320-1660) 61 From Christendom to Europe of the Monarchies 4. Drift and Turmoil (1320-1460) 63 5. Expansion and Split (1460-1560) 79 6. The Division Hardens (1560-1660) 99 III. Challenge to Monarchy (1660-1870) 117 From Europe of the Monarchies to Europe of the Nations 7. The Emergence of Stability (1660-1760) 119 8. Europe in Revolution (1760-1815) 137 9. New Forces Unleashed (1815-1870) 155 IV. Challenge to Liberalism(Since 1870) 175 Europe of the Nations confronted by Globalism 10. Expansion to the Limits (1870-1910) 177 11. Europe Eclipsed (1910-1950) 195 12. Retreat and Regrouping (1950-1990) 219 Conclusions: Europe Since 1990 243
- 3. Introduction: How the Past Can Illuminate our Future Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than one rash assertion has been made that the patterns of history no longer matter. Three years after the Wall fell, in 1992, a widely acclaimed book appeared in the US called “The End of History”, by Francis Fukuyama. This made the rather ambitious claim that, now that the Cold War had been won, the mainstream ideological causes of conflict in world history were over; the liberal economic and political model had finally achieved lasting dominance, effectively in perpetuity. What was most startling about this argument was the extent to which it was taken seriously by leading actors, especially in the US, the world’s most powerful country at the time. A decade later, in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York by fundamentalist Islamic hijackers, not so many people continued to take that claim so seriously. However, the response to that attack was itself informed by a very limited awareness of relevant history; it was a response that cost more American lives than the original attack in September 2001. More recently, in 2007, soon-to-be British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, declared that the long-standing pattern of economic “boom and bust” cycles had become a thing of the past. This was the year before the 2008 worldwide stock market crash that heralded the hardening of a “credit crunch” into the deepest recession for over half a century. He was not alone in believing something similar – Alan Greenspan, Chairman of US Federal Reserve, had led the way in arguing that, in modern conditions, markets could sort themselves out without need for Government attempts to manage economic cycles. That very belief was a major factor in the depth of the subsequent recession, given the length and excesses of the preceding boom. It was a classic case of the lessons of history having been unlearned, which has cost a great deal. Luckily, in responding to the crash of 2008, world leaders did finally show that they had at least learned something from history in the way that they actively worked together to contain the damage. An awareness of history is not necessary only for governments. Anyone concerned with how the world is changing, whether in a role of influencing policy or leading organizations or simply as interested citizens, needs to be informed by a sense of history. The unprecedented speed and extent of change going on in the world in the early twenty-first century is not a reason why history is no longer relevant. On the contrary, it means that we need to be informed by a historical view that goes back over centuries, and not simply decades. Only by taking a view of history that extends over centuries, can one grasp the sheer scale of potential transformation of the world in the years to come, as well as getting a better understanding of which structures and patterns in human history are more enduring and which can not necessarily be taken for granted. The changes that we are witnessing today are, as always, multi-faceted. We can see shifts taking place in the geographic balance of economic and political power between different countries and regions of the world. Physical force continues to be used in an attempt to shape the outcome of conflict, whether international or domestic, and the potential for this to escalate globally to irreversibly destructive scale is never too remote. New technology is having
- 4. a radical impact on the way people organise themselves, communicate and do business, and even on our sense of who we are as human beings. Ideas continue to evolve of how government and organisations should organise themselves, in order to compete successfully. The relationship between humanity and its natural environment continues to change and raise ever more serious issues. The combination of such issues is not in fact new. What is new is the speed and scale of change - but the nature and patterns of change retain many enduring qualities that we all need to understand if we are to be in the best position to plan for the future. Taking a longer look at history can also help us to question some features of our current landscape that we are used to taking for granted. One such example is the role of the nation state, which has been the dominant structure of governance in modern times, to the point that it is assumed to be part of the natural order. The formation of nations has been a much more complex process than the often depicted rise to the surface of some innate tribal communities with roots going back to the mists of time, breaking through “artificial” power structures. Take one example of this complexity: five of today’s nation states owe their current shape and even existence to their historical relationship with a historical dynasty, namely the Habsburgs. Switzerland and the Netherlands coalesced as entities through rebellion against the Habsburgs, Austria and Belgium became distinct entities through their loyalty to the Habsburgs, and what is now Germany is essentially what is left of the original Holy Roman Empire when the previous four countries have been taken out. To take another example, the inhabitants of the Channel Islands today speak English rather than French, simply because they were the only part of the French monarchy that the kings of England had managed to hold onto after being expelled from the rest of France. Conversely, had the English kings actually won the Hundred Years War, the link between England and France – and the integration of the two kingdoms’ ruling classes - would have been cemented and perhaps French (the then shared language) would now still be the language spoken by the English official system and indeed at this stage by all English people. At a time when the role of the European Union continues to be hotly debated, and its future is capable of moving in more than one direction, it can be instructive to study other periods in human affairs when the nation state was not central to people’s thinking, and when the distinction between local, “national”, European and even global power structures shifted quite markedly from one period to another. It can be instructive to look at what has driven such changes, and what their impact has been. At a time when the increasing integration of a global economy is making it more and more difficult for national governments to keep control, it becomes all the more important to consider whether such a mismatch between economic and governmental organisation has happened before, what its impact was, and how it was or was not responded to. Arguments of this sort are not confined to Europe. In the US today, the radical right increasingly questions the role and even existence of a federal government. Related to such
- 5. arguments, controversy continues to rage about the extent of the right of citizens to own their own personal weapons. For most of its history, Europe has had governments that did not have a monopoly on military force within their borders. Therefore it is also instructive to look at what difference it actually made when this changed, and whether this was a change that weakened or strengthened the rights and freedom of ordinary people. It is also relevant, given these arguments, to look at periods when governments were strong and when they were weak, and to compare the kinds of society and economy that could be found in each case. To get a true sense of this, we must look back further than the last hundred years. Today there is a growing sense that the global dominance of western culture may be coming to an end, with China forecast by many to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in less than two decades. Whatever the accuracy of such forecasts, a momentous shift is clearly under way. We need to get a better sense of the likely extent of such a change, as well as what it could mean for us. Such a major shift of leadership between rival powers and economies has been seen before in history, and from this we can get a better understanding of what has caused such shifts to happen, how relative or absolute they can be, and what the indicators of such change tend to be. We also need to understand what it is about European civilisation itself that has been distinctive, and particularly what have been its main sources of strength. We must be more open to learning from other civilisations – and indeed we have only really begun to learn from Asia on a significant scale in recent decades. At the same time, we must also be conscious of what it is about our own that we wish to protect and continue to build on. European civilisation has had an impact on the world that is uniquely profound. The historical dominance of European civilization at global level has in fact not been as long established as is often assumed – for example, European rule in India was fully established for only a century, following a period of piecemeal infiltration and conquest over a previous century; in Africa full conquest was even less long-lived, while in China European control never penetrated beyond a number of small footholds on the coast. Nonetheless, European culture has radically influenced how people in all continents live, work, travel, are governed, and the way they think about the world - whether for good or ill. Historians looking for the starting point of this transformation have traditionally pointed either to the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago, or to the Renaissance and Age of Exploration of five hundred years ago. In fact the momentum behind this transformation originated even earlier. The successive waves of growth and innovation which have characterised European civilisation really began at the turn of the previous millennium, as Europe recovered from the age of invasions. Therefore our story begins with the re-structuring of civilisation - such as it was - which took place during the centuries immediately preceding the year 1000 AD. While it would certainly be wrong to say that Europe’s rise to global dominance was a foregone conclusion from such an early stage, it is the case that the distinctive path taken of European civilization which ended in giving it such a decisive edge started to develop at that time, leading in successive stages to a revolutionary global position by the late eighteenth century.
- 6. This does not necessarily mean that other civilisations, such as China or Islam might not have been capable of developing such a lead, even in the eighteenth century, but the fact remains that core features developed by European civilization did end in providing it with that lead, however temporary it may prove to be, and this makes the origin and development of those features a focus of interest. The centuries which followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire were indeed chaotic ones; but it was from this chaos that a new society took shape which managed to combine two vital features. On one hand the situation stabilised enough to allow the economy to recover and grow; and on the other hand - and this is what was crucial - this growth was achieved without one organisation or social elite gaining such complete control that it could stop all further change, once it ran out of new ideas itself. People today naturally see mediaeval Europe as being a highly rigid, authoritarian and conservative world. By comparison with modern times this perception may be partly valid, but it should not obscure the contrast with societies such as those of ancient Rome, China, or Russia, where a single powerful elite could control a whole empire on a scale which would have been the envy of even the most despotic mediaeval European monarch. The vital difference did not lie simply in Europe's political fragmentation - the world of Islam, for instance, was just as divided as the world of Christendom. Mediaeval Europe was different because she had a class of military rulers which could not understand or control either the economic or intellectual life of their civilisation. In history we can see three broad forms of power - military, intellectual, and financial - and each developed completely separately in the disjointed world of post-Roman Europe. The nobility came to power as the military caste of Europe; the clergy became powerful on account of their early monopoly of literacy and thought; the bourgeoisie of the towns built their independence on their skills in trade and commerce. These were the so-called "three estates" on which the European social order came to rest for a large part of its history. None of these three power groups succeeded in achieving sustained domination over the others, and it was the extent to which this balance was effectively sustained over centuries which made Europe different from other civilisations. Ancient Rome had developed a pluralistic regime during the height of the Republic, but ultimately it succumbed to control by the army, or victorious factions of the army, which effectively determined who became the next emperor. In China, a remarkably resilient official class with its elaborate Confucian ethos developed a dominant role over two millennia ago. This class was indeed periodically subjected to military conquest by nomadic peoples or peasant usurpers. It was, for example, during the early fifteenth century, when the grip of this class had undergone its most prolonged period of weakness after the rise of the Ming dynasty with its peasant origins, that China came closest to launching a career of world leadership in commerce and exploration. Nonetheless, in this case as in the others, the old
- 7. official class ultimately reasserted its overriding conservative influence - which disdained interest in the world outside China. This dominance lasted over most of subsequent history until the destruction of the entire class by Communism in the middle of the twentieth century. The three estates in Europe developed as rival, and often antagonistic, forces which somehow had to learn to accommodate each other. A duke or king could be a powerful figure in mediaeval Europe; yet even the most formidable had to contend with the three estates, each belonging to a network of loyalty and influence which reached far beyond the borders of his realm. The clergy belonged to a powerful church led by a pope who answered to no king; merchants took part in a trading and banking system which spanned the continent, a system which monarchs increasingly needed access to in order to pay for their wars; the nobility itself was a cosmopolitan class whose family connections cut right across the borders of kingdoms. Such a remarkable balance in the spread of power did not develop overnight. It developed haltingly and in stages over many centuries. Nor should we think of such a "system" as having continued without change for hundreds of years: once the archetype described above had emerged in its fullest form, the picture began to change again. Whatever form this spread of power takes now or in the future, the critical issue is the need to ensure that the spread itself continues. If we allow small elites to use their financial resources to constantly increase their influence over both media and governments on a global scale, we need to be aware of the threat that this might represent for the future vitality of our civilisation. * * * This theme of the different forms of power and the interplay between them provides a central focus for the account of European history which follows. It provides a framework for considering not only military and political struggles, but also economic development and the interplay of rival ideas about how society should be ordered. On each of these three fronts - military, economic, and philosophical - one can see the different forms of power being wielded, and they must be understood in interaction with each other. As noted at the opening of this introduction, it was recently claimed that ideological conflict was dead, with the defeat of Communism by liberal capitalism. Since that claim was made, we have seen the revival of a much older form of ideological conflict, namely conflict driven by religious beliefs - whether fundamentalist Islam, or the increasing influence of Christian fundamentalism in polarising US politics - demonstrating that one does not need modern ideological movements to drive such conflicts between rival world views. These fundamentalist movements have a large part of their roots in the period with which this book begins, illustrating more than anything else the relevance of long-term history. While certainly not all conflict is ideologically driven, and can simply be a result of competition for resources and status, it is nonetheless true that major ideological conflicts have been a primary feature of European history. That is why four major ideological conflicts provide a central structure for organising this story.
- 8. Conventionally, European history tends to be divided into three separate eras: the Middle Ages, Early Modern, and Modern. The Reformation and the French Revolution are taken to provide the great dividing lines between these eras. Any such scheme for dividing history into epochs is necessarily artificial, but the foregoing has become so embedded in our collective consciousness that it has distorted our thinking and blinded us to some perspectives. That is why in structuring this account of European history I have instead taken the four great ideological crises - the Empire-Papacy struggle, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the twin challenge of Communism and Fascism - as the centrepiece for each section of the book rather than as the dividing lines between sections. The result has been interesting. For example if we look at the whole period from the early origins to the final exhaustion from the conflicts of the Reformation, from 1320 to 1660, as a single epoch - transcending the conventional division between mediaeval and modern - we find that the era has a number of distinctive features, such as religious schism or conflict, the use of mercenary armies, witch- hunting frenzy, periodic epidemics of disease, rulers regularly on or over the edge of bankruptcy, and repeated popular revolts. What becomes apparent is that, despite the remarkable flowering of artistic creativity, the invention of printing, and the discovery of new continents around the middle of this epoch (known as the Renaissance), the period as a whole exhibited less growth and innovation than the three centuries which preceded it. This perspective cuts completely across the more traditional view of the Renaissance as signalling the emergence of European society from mediaeval darkness. It is because the four ideological crises form the centrepiece of each section that the headings refer to the “challenge” to feudalism (the Empire-Papacy struggle), to Catholicism (the Reformation), to monarchy (the French Revolution), and to liberalism (the Russian Revolution and World War Two) successively. Unlike the other three crises, the Empire-Papacy conflict is not usually thought of as an ideological struggle in the same light as the French or Russian Revolutions. Nonetheless it did represent a clash between opposing concepts of authority. Feudalism developed from the bottom up, based on personal and family loyalty and mutual commitments of obligation; this conservative power system was confronted by an ideologically driven revolutionary bid by the Papacy to establish an absolute authority which would transcend traditional loyalties. The sub-heading to each of the four sections addresses the ideological basis of sovereignty in Europe. While in Section I the concept of west-central Europe as a single Christian commonwealth led by pope and/or emperor is accepted almost throughout the period (in theory at any rate), each of the subsequent sections sees a fundamental shift in the concept of what forms the basis of political authority in Europe. A fundamental point here is that the mediaeval concept of Europe as a single community held together by a common religious loyalty did not, as is so often assumed, give way directly to a Europe of the nations. There was a critically important intervening stage when loyalty to sovereign dynastic states - which is distinct from loyalty either to a specific religion or to an ethnically defined “nation” - was the fundamental basis of political order.
- 9. The individual chapter headings address the theme of the dynamics of growth and decline, cohesion and division, in Europe as a whole. It would not be possible to come up with twelve meaningful chapter headings on this theme if the whole story had been one of a single trajectory of growth. One can in fact identify two great waves of growth and progress. The first wave of growth began around the turn of the millennium in 1000 AD and continued until the thirteenth century, when Christendom’s sense of common purpose lost its force even as the momentum of growth and expansion continued on until early in the following century. There followed a long period of instability and turmoil where progress was tortuous and erratic. The traditional localised feudal structures of authority had become unable to contain the footloose political and economic forces generated by a growing money economy, and the ideological consensus underlying Christendom was eroded and then fell apart completely. This period of relatively slow and erratic progress continued right up until the late seventeenth century, when sheer exhaustion allowed a new consensus to develop around the state rather than the church as the basis of political authority, and central monarchies became strong enough to assert their control over events. This provided the stability which set the scene for the second great wave of even more explosive growth beginning in the eighteenth century. Despite the temporary disruption to this wave of growth and the collapse of Europe’s global dominance due to the catastrophe of 1914-1945, it is evident that the potential remains for this wave of growth to continue into the future - provided a reasonable degree of stability can be maintained. The issue facing us now is whether this progress can indeed be sustained, or whether we are again facing an era where our traditional power structures and the underlying ideological consensus are inadequate. The nation state still provides the basis of both our power structures and our ideology of political authority, but it may prove unable to contain the increasingly footloose global forces generated through the world economy and technological revolution. If there is any lesson to be learned from the account of Europe’s history which follows it is that effective power structures and a broadly shared ideological consensus are essential if the more persuasive forms of power (financial and especially intellectual) are to remain in the ascendant. Without effective power structures and an underlying ideological consensus about the legitimacy of government, military power inevitably comes to the fore and the world becomes a more violent place. If the latter happens, the dangers we face are greater than any faced in the history of the world to date. While studying history has great intrinsic fascination in itself, it is even more important to attempt to draw some meaning from it which can illuminate our understanding of the human condition and help us to think about the issues now facing us. It is my hope that what follows makes a contribution to this objective.