Europe: A History

Europe is not only a work of high merit but a very timely one. When the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have just emerged from "the enormous, badly organised school" - Ronald Hingley's apt image for Russian-inspired communism - it is particularly useful to have a history that does them justice. Davies' book shows the connections between the two halves of Europe. It completes our knowledge and indicates our future. For it seems likely that the more interesting events in our continent will happen in its eastern half in the years to come. Now we shall have an inclusive Europe and an inclusive history as well. Davies' book is the first serious attempt at such a history, a mammoth work based on great erudition, strong opinions, and a fiery prose style.

In the past Eastern Europe's role was confined to being sometimes the victim, sometimes the conqueror, of the steppes (first the Mongols, who hardly figure in Western history, and later the Turks, whom an East European king, John Sobieski, defeated outside the walls of Vienna). Russian history was permanently diverted from its course by the Mongol conquest and Russian political manners changed for the worse by the hegemony of the Golden Horde. Significant too was to be the German migration into Eastern Europe, and the organized attack on states such as Poland and Lithuania by the Teutonic knights - the "Baltic Crusade", which, inevitably, became an exercise in German eastward colonization. With these clashes of peoples, as well as the quarrels between kingdoms, it is not surprising that the German state that grew up on the edge of Eastern Europe should have been a military monarchy. Prussia brought into German politics the authoritarianism of czarist Russia, combined with some of the logical elements of eighteenth-century France. Its final gift to Europe was President Hindenburg and his worries about the fate of East Prussian estate owners, which had such a bad influence on the last years of the Weimar republic. Now a reunited Germany finds itself face to face with the enormous potential of Russia (even without Ukraine). The relations between them, and how these will affect the countries of Eastern Europe, will probably be the deciding factor in European history over the next half century.

As Davies shows, there have been innumerable historical definitions of Europe. A recent "history of Europe", sponsored by the European Commission, distinguished itself by leaving out Greece entirely. Nor has the emergence of the European Union, carrying with it aspirations to economic and political unity as well as a formidable bureaucratic apparatus based in Brussels, made things simpler. Our present EU may be meliorist in intent, but it brings with it no spur to the enthusiasm of peoples, though it may create a select band of initiates. A great historian, Hugh Seton-Watson, made the point when he observed how badly Europe needed a mystique and how insufficient were anti-communism and free trade as an ethos. Jean Monnet may have been an idealist, but the Europe he helped to create appears singularly unexciting to subsequent generations.