Europe

EUROPE. - One of the five continents of the earth.

I. GEOGRAPHY.

It is the smallest of the three parts traditionally recognized in the ancient continent. Form of this it from reliefs and traversed by great rivers. North-western E., from Ireland to Scandinavia, constitutes a territory of very ancient reliefs, which, leveled by a long erosive cycle, were "rejuvenated" by the Cenozoic uplift: massifs and mountains with rounded forms rise to over 2000 m., generally presenting abundant traces (lakes, moraines, fjords) of the glacial invasion by which they were affected. Central E., from France to south-western Poland, results predominantly from highly fragmented mountainous zones, irregularly arranged and interspersed with depressed strips (plains, seas), with rounded and tabular summits usually no higher than 1500-1800 m., themselves also the remnant of ancient masses demolished or truncated. Only southern E. preserves areas of the extreme western peninsula, never definable by physical limits from the Asiatic mass on which it is implanted with a broad base from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. With the 10 million sq. km. usually attributed to it, it represents barely 6.7% of the emerged lands, 12% of the ancient continent. 65% of its surface belongs to the trunk, 27% to the peninsulas, 8% to the islands: it follows that it is the most articulated of all the parts of the earth, as the one most deeply penetrated by the sea. Nevertheless this character of its diminishes proceeding from W. to E.: the so-called "Ponto-Baltic isthmus," from Riga to Odessa, makes it possible to distinguish from the oceanic-Mediterranean sector, with its highly indented outline, a continental block almost segregated from direct maritime influence. E. occupies a central position with respect to most of the emerged lands, and is almost entirely comprised within the temperate zone (barely 7% north of the polar circle). Its extreme limits fall at 71° 11' (North Cape), and 34° 48' (18th island of Gozo) N.; 10° 25' W. (Dunmore Head in Ireland) and 68° 5' E. Greenwich (Kara Gulf); its territory therefore extends 36° 23' in latitude and 78° 30' in longitude.

With the modest dimensions of the continent contrast the complexity of its geological history and the variety that results from it in surface forms. In a small space plains alternate and succeed mountains, valleys and hills, with a generally fragmentary plasticity, rich in transitions and nuances. Only its eastern half, where it expands as far as the Urals with a broad lowland, participates in the character of massive uniformity proper to the Asiatic continent. This lowland, almost entirely below 200 m. in height, continues westward into the German and French plains, not interrupted even by relief still fresh and vigorous, with peaks exceeding 3500-4000 m.: a whole series of "chains" traverses it, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Aegean and the Black Sea (Sierra Nevada, Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Carpathians, Balkans), enclosing between the corrugated and arched folds, here fragments of more ancient uplifted masses (Spanish Mesetas), there depressions once invaded by the sea or occupied by lakes, and later wholly or in part filled. The maximum heights of E. are found in this zone (Mont Blanc, 4810 m. in the Alps, Mulhacén, 3481 m. in the Spanish Sierra Nevada); in the other two the highest values remain considerably lower (Glittertind: 2478 m., in Norway; Puy de Dôme: 1886 m., in Auvergne).

When the narrow peri-Arctic fringe and the regions of high mountain are excluded, all of E. is in the domain of temperate climates. The countries around the Mediterranean are characterized by mild and short winters, hot and long summers, rains predominantly in winter, summer drought and great atmospheric luminosity. In the remaining sectors one passes by gradual transitions from the typically oceanic climate of western E., with cool summers, mild winters, weak temperature ranges, copious rains distributed in every season, to the distinctly continental one of the Sarmatic lowland, where winters become rigorous and long, summers short, the diurnal and annual contrasts of temperature high and precipitation diminishes, falling predominantly in summer. The extreme conditions foreshadow, in this case too, the behavior of the neighboring Asiatic sectors (Siberia), to which likewise (Central Asia) the circum-Caspian depression recalls us, where temperature ranges remain very strong and the rains, almost all in spring, are reduced to minimum values.

The natural vegetation reflected well, originally, in its landscape aspect, the complicated range of these variations: the long human occupation has nevertheless canceled and notably altered almost everywhere, with deforestation and cultivation, the primitive conditions. Apart from the slender band of tundra that fringes the circumpolar area, the European territory falls for the most part within the domain of forest (of conifers in the northern region, mixed and broad-leaved in central E.), while toward the SE. extend treeless zones that pass into true steppes in the circum-Caspian sector. The maritime countries of the Mediterranean are instead covered by the so-called maquis, formed of low thickets of evergreen plants and small trees: characteristic above all there is the diffusion of the olive and the oak.

The absolute population of E. today stands at around 540 million inhabitants: less than half that of the Asiatic continent and little more than 1/5 (22.7% in 1958) of that of the whole earth. In the last two centuries it has almost quadrupled: it was 100 million in the middle of the 17th century, 175 at the beginning of the 19th, over 400 at the beginning of the following one and approximately identical to the present one before the two world wars, in 1914 and in 1940. The figure of density (53 inhabitants per sq. km.) is by far the highest among those of the parts of the world (ca. 6 times that of Asia, more than 9 times that of Africa and South America): but this average value results from maxima (282 inhabitants per sq. km. in Belgium, 280 in Holland, 207 in the United Kingdom) and minima (10 in Norway, 13 in Finland, 15 in Sweden) very far apart. Both density and agglomeration in urban centers tend to decrease, roughly, from W. toward E., showing themselves higher in the regions where large-scale industry flourishes. E. numbers 16 of the 41 cities with over 1 million, and 30 of the 72 with over 500 thousand inhabitants that are in the whole world (around 1948).

The current (1950) political situation is summarized in the table below.

Although this situation must be considered in some cases (Germany, Trieste) still fluid, the table allows one to note at once the profound political changes determined by the Second World War: only 13 of the 31 European States (excluding, that is, Turkey and the Free Territory of Trieste, destined to disappear) show no territorial variations. No less notable are the displacements, voluntary or forced, of populations (especially German and Polish) that preceded, accompanied and followed the events of war; as well as the territorial and demographic enlargement of the U.S.S.R., which now absorbs within its frontiers more than ½ of the surface and over ¼ of the population of E. As for the distribution of the latter among the three principal ethno-linguistic groups — Neo-Latin, Germanic and Slavic — the numerical equilibrium recorded a century ago (1/3 each) has by now been broken to the benefit of the Slavs, who alone confront, with about half of the total, the two other groups united.

That in the last hundred years, above all as a consequence of the two great world wars, a profound upheaval has taken place in the European economy is manifest, but it is perhaps premature to attempt to define this upheaval in statistical terms, also because, apart from the difficulty of taking into account the new political arrangement, the data relating to the European sector of the U.S.S.R. are lacking. The necessity of referring back to pre-war conditions is nevertheless justified by the rapid recovery now under way in all sectors of this economy, even if its value proves to be decidedly diminished in the new physiognomy of international relations.

Approximately 1/2 of the European soil is cultivated (highest % in the lowland countries); less than 1/3 is covered with forests (regions of the N. and E.) and scrub (Mediterranean countries); roughly 1/10 is given over to natural meadows and pastures (in the N.); the rest is unproductive (highest % in the NE zones). Before the second great war conflagration, E. participated in world production with 90-95% of the rye, 85% of olive oil, over 80% of oats, flax and sugar beet; 75% of flax, 60% of wheat and barley, etc., while for other crops (maize, rice, tobacco, cotton) the quantities were modest. Even today the majority of those continental primacies is maintained or is about to be regained, but increased consumption has imposed a greater volume of imports, since E., even before the war, was clearly in deficit, on the whole, as regards raw materials of vegetable origin, especially in the sector destined for industries (textiles and oilseeds).

Pre-war E. raised 25% of the cattle (U.S.S.R., Germany, France), 32% of the sheep (U.S.S.R., Ireland, Mediterranean E.), 40% of the pigs (U.S.S.R., Germany, Poland, France), 40% of the horses (U.S.S.R., Poland, Germany) of the whole world; a livestock patrimony decimated by the war, but by now almost entirely reconstituted or in the process of reconstitution (except for pigs). Today there are probably approximately 150 million head of cattle, 140 of sheep, 50 of pigs, 25-30 of goats and 20 of horses. As for fishing, the Atlantic countries of E. alone achieve a product equal to a little less than 1/3 of the world's.

Although poor in gems and precious metals, E. figured notably also in the field of extractive activities, inasmuch as its geologically most ancient terrains conceal conspicuous reserves of

fossil fuels and iron. The small continent thus gave, among other things, before the war, 45% of the coal and crude iron and over 40% of the steel produced on the whole earth. Moreover, while it had the monopoly of certain raw materials (e.g., graphite and magnesium), for those of which it was short (e.g., copper, zinc, tin, lead and silver) or which were necessary to its industry, it could count on the contribution of the colonial countries. The contraction produced after the war appears all the more noticeable in that the preparation and conduct of this war had determined a far more intense rhythm in extractive activity. Nevertheless the recovery has been fairly rapid, as is demonstrated by the indices of industrial production, which these raw materials condition and feed.

For an equal surface area, the European space was and is the most densely affected, in the whole world, by the development of industries. The maximum expansion of these takes place in correspondence with the most compact densification of the population: two circumstances that are evidently one a function of the other. Therefore the barycenter of large-scale modern industry coincides in substance with the regions of the middle E., from the Seine to the Elbe, from the Rhone to the Danube, from the North Sea to the Po, as well as with the southern part of Great Britain, while characteristic of the postwar period are the rapid development of new centers in some of the sectors of the European zone of the U.S.S.R. (Ukraine, central Russia, lower Volga, Uruli, central and southern), and the progressive reduction of handicrafts. Industrial production, upset by the war, has regained and is regaining almost everywhere the prewar positions, but without being able to give back to the continent the place it once held in international exchanges. While in 1913 European imports and exports represented about 3/5 of these exchanges, today they have probably fallen to barely 1/3, with the addition that almost all the States of the continent present a passive trade balance.

European commerce is predominantly maritime: in the prewar period 2/3 of the world merchant marine belonged to E. The heavy losses caused by the war have reduced its consistency to less than 1/5, and have also altered the hierarchy of its ports, 3 of which (London, Rotterdam, Antwerp) registered in normal times over 20 million tons (net) annually of goods entered and cleared. Waterways exploited by international traffic are only to the N. of the Mediterranean E. (Danube, Rhine). In the European part of the U.S.S.R. alone there are 38 thousand sq km. of navigable riverways, which serve essentially internal traffic. The most important network of European communications is the railway one, whose density is greatest in the central and western countries (12 km. per 100 sq km.). On the whole the continent today counts 420 thousand sq km. (31.5% of the world total) of railways; the postwar period has seen these communications extend especially in eastern E. (Poland, Ukraine, central Russia). Also in the postwar period air traffic has greatly developed, which now ensures regular and rapid communications not only between all the countries of the continent, but also between these and the other parts of the world (10-12 hours of transoceanic flight between E. and North America; note the growing importance, in this regard, of the Arctic Mediterranean).

II. HISTORY.

I. IN THE CLASSICAL GRECO-ROMAN AGE

E. is a geographical complex with its own plastic configuration, having a distinct character of its own in the relief of the soil, in the watercourses, in the climate. But E. is also a historical complex, with its own moral configuration, having characteristics proper to it in traditions, memories, customs, taste, art, religiosity, thought, culture. The concept of these two Europes, the one physical, the other spiritual, came into being and developed slowly, in the course of time, both

in European soil than in distant lands, and it kept expanding and growing clearer with the ever more precise affirmation of a European civilization and of a knowledge of it in the world. Very late did E. come to be thought of as an organism of its own, both geographic and historical, or as set in contrast to other continents, Asia or Africa. European civilization begins in Greece with its forms of city-states, either democratic or military, each jealous of its own independence, but all driven by a will to primacy. The Greeks felt themselves superior to other peoples, and thought of them with contempt, calling them barbarians. They therefore had a Hellenic consciousness, not a European one; but of the future E. they anticipated the republican tendency, that is, unlike Asiatic despotism, the limitation of central political power in favor of local and individual liberties. Greece defended these liberties against Asiatic imperialism, but the struggle against Persia ended by weakening her and delivering her into the hands of the princes of Macedonia, so powerful, with Alexander the Great, as to carry as far as the Indus River the originality of the culture and thought of little Athens.

The Hellenic world expanded, but its geographical extent was precisely an obstacle to a European conception of it, just as the expansion of the Roman world was an obstacle to it; if the one found itself straddling E. and Asia, especially with the Empire of Alexander the Great which rested on various capitals, Athens, Pergamon, Rhodes, Alexandria, the other embraced only one part of E., up to the Rhine-Danube line, and various parts of Asia and Africa. A European consciousness could not arise over pluricontinental, or intercontinental, expanses. Greece, on the other hand, has a presumptuous consciousness of itself, setting itself against whoever, not Greek, had to be ascribed to the great barbarian family. Hellenism was all of E. Greece the only homeland of the human spirit, the only civil value in its time. For three hundred years E. is summed up in Greece. The

European problem was rather seen as an Asiatic problem, that is, as liberation from every Oriental interference. And this is the impression one receives in reading Herodotus, Isocrates, Theopompus. Isocrates felt Greece in the E.-Asia contrast, especially after the Peace of Antalcidas of 387 B.C. which assigned Greek cities of Asia to the king of Persia; but it is always the contrast of Greek and non-Greek, of Greek and barbarian. And precisely then, for the first time, faced with the duality of the Greek world, divided between European soil and Asiatic lands, Isocrates speaks of a European policy and an Asiatic policy, while he invokes from Philip II an expedition into Asia that would restore the superiority of E. over Asia, and shows himself favorable to accepting the supremacy of Philip if only to liberate Ionia from the yoke of the Persians. On the same theme his pupil Theopompus returns, suggesting to Philip II that he create a great European State to balance the great Asiatic State of Persia. Thus E. is felt within the framework of Persia.

The Roman age does not have the concept of E.; it operates in the Mediterranean sector, of which E. is a simple appendage. It nevertheless has a clear consciousness of Italy as a geographical and historical entity, with traditions that associate all Italians around Rome as their common center.

The Social War, as narrated by Livy, gives clear signs of this. The new capital baptized with the name of Italica is a warning to Rome, which disdained solidarity with the peoples of its own stock, who had helped it in the conquest of the peninsula.

Caesar perceives the northern danger and with his expeditions into Gaul wants to give the peninsula a barrier to defend it on the western Alpine side. « Fasa trahunt », « the republic becomes an empire, but preserves the republican modalities of Greece, protecting the right of the individual and perfecting the system of public and private justice. The policy of conquest beyond Italy has voices of disapproval, especially among the poets, even before Annaeus Florus condemned all imperial policy, guilty of excessive expansionism, while there is a chorus of praise for those who knew how to fortify the Alpine ring, « bulwark of Italy », « wall of Italy » as is found in Polybius, in Strabo, in Cicero, in Pliny the Second and in many others.

But Rome could not halt at the Italic borders or at the lands of E. The persistence of the Persian danger, the ca-

forced [Rome] to take up arms beyond the Bosporus, to be the heir of Alexander's political tradition, to protect the precious heritage of Greek culture, accepting upon itself the burden of the East. The struggle against the king of Pontus recalls the grand days of Marathon and Salamis, because of the nature of the relations between Europe and Asia, which Mithridates brought back onto the Mediterranean scene. In 63 B.C. all of Asia Minor obeyed Rome, and the latter faced the danger of submitting to the influence of the East in the order of institutions and customs, that is, of introducing habits of despotism where the idolatry of liberty prevailed. In this contrast the personality of the European world is still felt, now represented by Rome, as previously by Greece: and Virgil stopped, frightened, to meditate on that danger in the famous passage of Book VIII of the Aeneid, in which he shows the idols of the East arrayed to fight the Penates and the guardian deities of the Roman state. The victory of Octavian over Antony is hailed as the defense of Roman or European ideals of order and liberty from the threats of oriental tyranny. The victory of Actium prolonged for European civilization the benefits and the lights of Hellenic culture. Rome then had a truly European mission: to introduce the element of the city, unknown to the Germans, into the northern regions — that city which gave the fundamental structure to European civilization itself, wholly bound even in the Middle Ages to the Municipality and the Church. In the imperial age the nascent religion of Christ reaches the borders of the Empire and in the 4th and 5th centuries, sustained by the favor of the supreme authority of the State, contends with and comes to surpass the old pagan religion.

The Church little by little, from persecuted becomes tolerated, from tolerated becomes dominant. To it belongs the direction of moral and social life. The Caesars abandon the ancient title of pontifex maximus, which passed instead to the bishop of Rome, to whom primacy over the other bishops was acknowledged, while the capital of the Empire became the center of the Catholic Church. The Empire dissolves, the Church organizes itself. The priesthood appropriates Latin and will tenaciously preserve it, even when it declines as a vernacular language. Peoples begin to differentiate themselves by their different attitude toward the Church, which is preparing to penetrate the barbarian hordes in order to tame them, to win them to Christianity, to save the concept of unity, to spread the use of Roman law together with a higher ideal of humanity, of justice, of good.

The barbarian invasions overturn the work of Roman civilization. With the beginning of the reign of Odoacer in 476 A.D., that measure of European unity which the Rome of the Caesars had managed to compose as far as the Rhine-Danube line dissolves, and E., prey to the various Germanic tribes, moves toward becoming a mosaic of small kingdoms. But another unity is arising, founded on a religious motive.

II. IN THE MIDDLE AGES

At first it seems that the contrast between European and non-European must cease forever, since the religion of Christ is above differences of territory and race, and aspires to the unity of the human race under a single spiritual head with a tendency to become temporal: pontifical theocracy. But the Church is in reality the only organism that extends its authority and capacity for life over European soil without limitations of a political order imposed by the barbarian kingdoms. Through the work of the Church the Hellenic sensibility persists; whoever accepts its dogmas is a civilized man; the unbeliever is the barbarian who must convert if he wishes to ascend to the height of new moral values.

With good historical foundation G. Schnitzer has been able to establish that the constituent elements of the ancient world, endowed with an intrinsic and enduring value, survived thanks to the great Christian family, which assimilated them, making them serve and connect together the various peoples of Europe, when it ran the risk of becoming a vast barbarian encampment.

The ancient Roman virtues, the practical sense, the genius for organization, activity, the art of leading men and gathering them within the light of a principle of order, coordinated with an eternal purpose, formed the merits of the Church of Rome which, in place of the too arid, inconsistent and amoral cult of Augustus, substituted the penetrating and cohesive force of the evangelical doctrine, evangelizing all of E. and ensuring a strongly and intimately unitary imprint upon Western civilization, which was to conquer the rest of the world.

From the 5th century onward, the triumphant hymn of the Church, the Te

Deum, at least in its earliest redaction, resounds beneath the vaults of the cathedrals and begins with its magnificent notes the work of elevating the masses, no longer scattered like flocks in the countryside. Across all the lands won to the worship of the Cross, there echoes the sublime chant of gratitude, of invocation and of prayer. Sacred music descends into hearts, speaks to feeling, reaches out to the sins and sorrows of the old society in decay, and with its very words, together with its notes of tenderness and love, unites the scattered common people and suggests precepts of life and means of expiation. It is always an effectively unifying action.

Therefore the Church represents, amid the great variety of peoples occupying E., the only European reality, unitary also in the language it uses as a standard for believers, the sole means of intellectual cooperation and the channel of ancient culture even to the new peoples of the continent. The term of differentiation, therefore, is the christianitas or the ecclesia; the universitas ecclesiae, which is the basis of medieval political thought, absorbs within itself every new and possible conception of E. And with the spread of Christianity among the barbarians it may be said that medieval European unity is a creation of the Christian Church. This spreads its missionaries and its monks into every corner of the old continent, to make known to all the Nordic, Germanic or Slavic peoples the message of the Gospel. It prepares their fusion by means of spiritual elements: the commonality suggested by faith in Christ, one and the same conception of the divine and the human, of guilt and forgiveness, of sin and expiation, of duty and right; it is the new European unity obtained by a progressive drawing of all souls to the foot of the altar and before the image of the Crucified.

Sacred art too, together with liturgical music, collaborates in the creation of a European organism having uniformity of life in taste, in custom, in devotion to the divinity. It is a single phalanx of builders, the magistri comacini, who, setting out from the shores of Lake Como, emigrate toward the most distant points of E., scattering along their passage the austere basilicas in Romanesque style, which cause human associations to be reborn where war has passed with its ruins, while there unfolds a history likewise Italian of bishops, of monks, of saints who assist, protect, and direct the moral reconstruction. When one encounters a church, in Germany, in France, in Norway, on the thresholds of the Sarmatian plain, one encounters Italy. An art heavy and strong and rough as the times demand, far from the petty realism of classical art, but suited to meditation and recollection, upon the frightened land of barbarism, where, through the work of religious building, confidence in the goodness of men is reborn through God's forgiveness. The people identify themselves with the Church which, rising everywhere and with the same architecture, modest and severe, whether at the edge of tombs or in the free atmosphere of the countryside, speaks to all one same language, human and divine at once.

Little by little the European world is no longer divided into barbarians and non-barbarians, but constituted of believers in Christ; a presupposition of a religious consciousness that tends to create political unity, according to the medieval idea of the ordinatio ad unum of the whole respublica christiana, unus populus, una civitas, corpus mysticum.

In the 11th century the religious bond that held the East and the West bound together is broken, and the Byzantine Church, ever more closely tied to the Empire of Constantinople, becomes wholly alien to the Church of Rome. European Christendom emerges more clearly as a religious entity, separated also by culture from the Eastern world, and can more actively turn to the conversion of the Nordic countries, where the Vikings still offered tenacious resistance; but in a short time Rome wins them to the cri-

Christian. When one considers the geographical limits of this christianitas, the abstract presupposition of the unity of the human race, longed for by the Church, acquires value through a substantial European reality, since it is in E. that the humanum genus is properly condensed according to the medieval concept, especially in Dante.

The term E. does not yet embrace the whole of physical E., but above all the bloc of the Romano-Germanic peoples, at whose center stands Italy. Russia is not yet E., because it has not yet been reclaimed culturally and morally, on a par with the other counter-Western nations.

The unitary ideal of the Church must struggle not only against the last unknowns of the European geographical world, but, and even more, against the particularism of the various tribes that filled barbarian E. with themselves during the period of invasion.

To the political principle of the Regnum which they attempt to alter in a Roman manner when they approach a civil order, the Church opposes the Roman tradition of imperial unity, striving to make it coincide with Catholic unity through the sacred investiture of the Empire. The consecration of Charlemagne at Christmas of 800 is a defense of Latin E. against barbarian E.; the newly elected must use his sword for the conquest of lands, still idolatrous, to the maxims of the Gospel.

Charlemagne remains faithful to the religious investiture: his wars are evangelical missions, takeovers in the name of Christ: he is not the successor of the Caesars of Rome, but of St. Boniface: his life is wholly and always a sacred apostolate even amid the rigor of battles: at Easter of 774, during the siege of Pavia, he hastens to Rome and kisses the floors of the basilica of St. Peter as a simple pilgrim. A happy expression of the Catholic program, the religious unity of E., Charles halts Islamic expansionism beyond the Pyrenees, along the Ebro, subjugates and converts the pagan and rebellious peoples between the Elbe and the Oder, attends their Baptism with the waters of the Weser and Padendorf, sends new missionaries among the Germans and Slavs, begins the fusion of Mediterranean E. with Baltic and Danubian E.

What had not succeeded for Odoacer, nor for Theodoric who operated outside the Church, was possible for Charlemagne because he was aided by the Pontiff and the Catholic hierarchy. Much of the ancient Roman order was reborn: a still formless mass of peoples was gathered within a first religious and political community. The great medieval idea was realized for an instant: one Church, one spiritual pastor, one prince superior to all for the peace of all, almost king and priest.

Thus the Carolingian Empire, and then those invested in the Germanic dynasties, had the task of elaborating a European consciousness that was to consider in common accord the religious unity with the territorial and political unity of E. The Islamic conquest shifts the old centers of Mediterranean unity. But it is still the Catholic idea that is the conservative element of E., which it defends with the protection of the traditional faith.

Monasticism is the most active militia of the Church, the perennial life of its energies in hours of bewilderment and battle. The monk is a pilgrim who crosses E. bearing everywhere a light of life, of hope, of faith, in the stormy night that from time to time darkens souls and peoples. He is a conservative, but he is also a force of impulse in the evolution of Christian civilization. The Irish monasteries were centers of culture, of work, of artistic education, as well as schools of divine service. Celtic monasticism soon gives way, in the 7th-8th century, to the Benedictine, an instrument of higher conquests. Prayer, chant, common reading, work, discipline. Monasticism then becomes religion, economy, agriculture, love of the land, reclamation of marshes, reforestation, school, library. The monastery keeps ancient culture safe: it reworks it in the sacred vessels of Christian thought; if it incorporates into the world, it supplies counselors to princes, amalgamates the most disparate nationalities, permeating them with its own spirit of charity, extending the network of its own family, preserving for the Church its universal mission. Disciples of Benedict were St. Augustine, St. Wilfrid of York, St. Boniface who brought the Message to England, Frisia, Saxony. No less vast was the civilizing and moralizing action of the monks of Cluny, in Burgundy, the monastery founded in 910 by Duke William of Aquitaine, whence came the program of a more rigorous monastic discipline, but with the new concept of the coordination of all monasteries, a single organism with vital members with numerous ramifications, and subordinate to a single head, all dependent on the Holy See. At the beginning of the decline of Cluny arises the power of the Cistercians, who spread throughout E. and renew it.

A grandiose purpose, in which lies the presentiment of an E. obedient to the command of Rome, presides over the movement of the Crusades, which is announced upon a vast arena of battle, as a European movement, which associates together the military element and the religious element. The combatant who goes against the Hungarians or the Slavs or the Arabs, whether Norman or Spanish, whether he comes from Genoa, from Pisa or from Venice, is always and still the old soldier of Christ who bears the ensign of the banner of St. Peter, who carries with him the cry of St. George or of St. Benedict and makes it resound high on the battlefields where the symbols of the Faith flutter, the banners with the Cross and the image of the saints.

(Int. British Council)

The great struggle dreamed of as the battle of the Lord and "proelium Domini" broke up into individual episodes, lost its original character of a single front in the presence of God for the cause of Christ, whose temple had been profaned on the roads of the Holy Land; yet even the personal and local impulses were composed into unity by virtue of that religious soul that dwelt within it and gave to all a common meaning: to ensure the existence and freedom of a Christian and Roman E. within the sacred circle of its borders.

Accordingly, the Crusades, the work of knights, pilgrims, princes, nobles and common people, come from every point of the old continent, elaborated a European consciousness within the framework of a common religiosity. The initiative of a worldwide enterprise on the part of the papacy was crowned by the astonishing response of E. to the appeal of Urban II, expressed by the mighty cry "God wills it" and by the departure of ca. 200,000 toward the distant East, where no more than 50,000 arrived. If in this sacrifice there is not yet a clear sentiment of unity, there is nonetheless the awareness of a danger that loomed over all at one and the same moment, and the concrete expression of a common will to resist.

From the dissolution of the imperial unities of the Middle Ages emerged the great nations, expansions of the first barbarian kingdoms, and an operative element on the front lines of modern history. Their independence was only shadowed by a vague imperial tutelage that gradually faded and divested itself of authority. Forces of linkage were ecclesiastical culture, the first colonization by the maritime republics of Italy, the Crusades, and, as consequences, commercial exchanges, banking services that broadened in vastness the horizon and civic activity, bringing the Roman Mediterranean closer to the Baltic. The Peruzzi of Florence reached with their bank loans as far as the court of London; the Banco di S. Giorgio as far as Madrid on the western side, to the ports of the Black Sea on the Asian front. Thus European unity was strengthened by a European economy and cooperation.

III. IN THE MODERN AGE

The European unity expressed by medieval theocracy now suffers violent ruptures.

Constantinople - the second eye of Europe - passed into Turkish hands, complicating the Balkan situation for the destinies of Europe and reducing the dominion of the Christian idea. A part of Europe becomes linked to Asia as during the crisis of Greek civilization. But the fall of Constantinople also provokes an awakening of religious militancy against the spreading Turkish danger, in Hungary, in Transylvania, in the Danubian countries, in Poland, which become bulwarks of European unity under the sign of the Cross of Christ.

Europe, made manifold by the variety of national monarchies, remains one through the fundamental solidarity that is born of common religion and of hatred toward the infidels. The combative spirit of the old Crusade continues under the banner of Christ and the guidance of the papacy, which renews until the battle of Lepanto the attempt to save the Holy Places for Europe. Christopher Columbus, the last crusader, who unconsciously opens to the old continent new tasks of labor and wealth, and to the Church new lands to convert.

The Lutheran Reformation deals a harsh blow: it is a reaction to the unifying policy of the papacy, to which the great enemy of Rome opposed the dissolving force of religious individualism and Germanic individualism. It is a first explosion of nationalist sentiment in contrast with the European spirit in its form of theocracy as the Middle Ages had elaborated it. National individualism becomes religious individualism. Indeed, with 1520 the glorious epoch that everywhere recognized one and the same spiritual power comes to a close.

But Humanism, which asserts itself as love of antiquity, yet grafted onto medieval Faith, accepts the battle, and in the duel between Erasmus and Luther is summed up the contrast between the unitary conception of Latin culture, strengthened by the unity of the Faith, and the new ideal of the national Church and of a culture founded upon a Germanic tradition.

Humanism, even though it sets out from Italy as its native homeland, asserts itself in its subsequent development as a European phenomenon, so that once again, whoever encounters Humanism on European soil encounters Italy. The Church had unified; the Renaissance, which has in the pontiffs its patrons and promoters, continues the unifying work. The sense of harmonious balance and of wise concord, the will to conciliation, the famous "concordia discors," are the vital soul of Humanism because Humanism is above all Christian in the face of the mysteries of the absolute, the creations of art, the most beautiful pictorial figurations, in the exaltation of nature, in the effort to realize with new methods, neither scholastic nor medieval, the unity of Faith and knowledge, of theology and philosophy; thus alongside aesthetic values, importance is given to moral and religious values, and rebirth comes to mean regeneration, exaltation of man in the exaltation of God. Humanism imposes upon the arts and upon the process of the spirit a uniform style: in Rome, in Florence, in Paris, in London, in Madrid, in Brussels, the conception of the world presents itself renewed in one and the same way. Humanism is Europe, all Europe in a rediscovered harmony between the dignity of man and the sublimity of God.

In the torment that the rupture of religious unity provokes, classical art offers all its comfort of lights and colors, of realism and naturalism to enrich with beauty and sweetness the aspects of the Christian creed, while the humanist sees Europe as the ensemble of the learned who love the classical texts and art in this form reborn to new life.

Little by little a Germanic Humanism too rebuilds the bridge that Luther broke, and Latin culture remains the cohesive element of civilization

European. With the Portuguese discoveries, E. places itself at the center of world history and is contemplated as a whole.

The era of christianitas is not closed. The Council of Trent gives it broad new scope in the world; beyond the oceans the renewed Church carries on another history of conquest. The new Empire of Charles V arises by pontifical investiture, and the Habsburg condemns Lutheranism. The Renaissance period also gives us the clear conception of E. as having its own political, moral and traditional personality.

It is Machiavelli who judges it an unmistakable entity in relation to the other continents. In his discourses on war he proposes not to go beyond "the bounds of E.," and "not to give account of what has been customary in Asia!" because he perceives a profound diversity between Asia and E.; the former, enslaved to despotic rule, the latter, always intent on defending the benefits of liberty and sometimes even of republican virtue. Christopher Columbus plays no small part in renewing the world of opinions and interests. The discovery of America and the knowledge of lands populated by savages, while it better defines the old continent, helps the European to distinguish himself all the more brilliantly as a superior civilized whole in the face of other peoples. It seems hardly believable to the learned humanists, who glory in being the heirs of ancient greatness, that they have found other peoples on whom to bestow the epithet of barbarians in order better to ennoble their own culture and the whole of European civilization that depends on it.

And since the struggle against the Islamic danger was not closed by the Crusades, the idea of E. takes shape a second time as well, setting itself against the concept of Turks, Moors, Infidels. Thus in the Renaissance the name of E. is accompanied by the awareness of the necessity of holy war against the Infidel. The anti-E. at that moment is personified in the Turk. Then Tasso takes as his subject "the effort of E.," which has turned in concord toward an action of Christian Faith (Gerusalemme liberata, I, 24), and invites his prince to such an enterprise so that "in peace... the good people of Christ... may be seen." Ariosto too, abandoning his jesting manner, sighs seriously over the state of E. which, torn by internal hostilities, delays in fighting for the freedom of the Holy Places. The European vision persists in the milieu of the medieval conception of "christianitas."

Then, when in the 17th and 18th centuries the anti-European motif arises, fed by the exaltation of savages as beings uncorrupted by the evils of civilization, it too helps, through a play of contrasts, to study the European better, and therefore to know him better, as can be seen in Montesquieu, who uses this procedure to define what the European man is.

Thus in the total balance, the modern age, despite initially passive factors, subsequently enhances the European entity taken as a whole, succeeding in flattering national ideals and unitarily European tendencies.

But the idea of nation also acts with forces of its own, which reveal themselves above all in the pursuit of a European hegemony, after the acquisition of national independence; and this comes to oppose the formation of a European consciousness, which can coexist only on bases of equality and mutual respect, even amid disparity of forces. Nation against nation, the will to preponderance over the whole of E., these are the first great acts of war of the modern age. But the principle of equilibrium, intended to prevent one State from becoming territorially stronger than another so as not to create dangers to the independence of individual states, is also the guiding norm of the new European politics. It determines the formation of leagues and counter-leagues, of small and great alliances that are a preparatory school for the concept of European unity and federation as the sole guarantee of general peace.

From the 16th to the 18th century the course of history continues to oscillate between the two poles of hegemony and equilibrium. The attempt of one or another among the major powers to carry out the conquest of Italy, a condition for prevailing over all, is repeated several times and is the characteristic of modern E. But the reaction is carried out with equal insistence to re-establish the equilibrium, that is, a certain constancy in the relation of the forces that compose the continental system. It is a dynamic, not static, equilibrium, attained with general advantages, all or nearly all, at the expense of Italy.

The first effort for a European hegemony is made by France, through the work of Charles VIII and then of Louis XII. The second is the Habsburg one with Charles V and Philip II, Spain and the Empire, opposed by France with Francis I and then with Henry II. And the whole 16th century is filled with this war. Italy falls into servitude. But there is much passivity also for those who emerge victorious.

Spain fails in its audacious intent to dominate France and England, and from the ruins of its former greatness a new power will be born: the United Provinces of Holland.

In the following century Ferdinand II, making himself champion of the crusade against heresy, aims to subjugate the Germanic countries that had broken away from the Church of Rome, and opens the Thirty Years' War, but with an unhappy outcome.

The alliance of Richelieu's France with the Protestant princes confirms the freedom of conscience of their countries; the Peace of Westphalia strengthens territorially and politically the old Brandenburg, the central nucleus of the future Prussia, destined to become, after the activity of Frederick II, the antithesis of Austria on the plane of ambitions for European primacy.

But with Louis XIV, the Sun King, France returns to the offensive in the Low Countries and on the Rhine, then on Italy and on Spain, with the intention of substituting its own hegemony for the Habsburg one. The contest among Paris, Madrid, Vienna fills three centuries of European life. In these continental vicissitudes England, having abandoned its aspirations upon France after the negative outcome of the Hundred Years' War, takes an ever more lively interest in the destiny of E., and obtains the separation of the two crowns, of France and of Spain, with a progressively clearer awareness of the necessity that it prevent the formation of any hegemony, so as not to have formidable competitors in its oceanic expansion. From this moment London considers itself the needle of the balance of E. But in this game France and England alternate. Indeed, both come to glimpse the common interest of all E., that the servitude of Italy disappear in order to remove from European ambitions what is the element of discord and the principal cause of the repeated wars of preponderance in E.

This very new idea begins to emerge from the laborious discussions of the Congresses of Utrecht and Rastadt, and then from the peaces that follow the wars of the Polish and Austrian succession, in which Italy had always been the object of territorial rearrangements.

(courtesy of the late B. Ingenburg)

A foreshadowing of this great idea, which would bring about a revolution in European diplomacy, are the doctrinal experiments for a settlement of Italy: from that of Henry IV and Sully formulated in 1601 to the later one, by a century and a half, of the Marquis d'Argenson. Meanwhile the European family is enriched by two new members: Prussia and Russia, destined to enter the ranks of the great powers. This is the product of a slow evolution, forced by the intervention of strong personalities, especially in Russia which, because of its greater distance, finds more difficulty in entering the orbit of Western life. Frederick II and Peter the Great are the chief architects of the European greatness of Prussia and Russia. Catherine II, continuing the work of Peter, opens for Russia the road toward the Mediterranean, with the Tauride, Sevastopol and Odessa: her eye looks even further, to Byzantium. Sad compensation: the disappearance of Poland and the expulsion of Sweden from the Gulf of Finland.

The political character of E. is almost entirely formed in its plurinational character. Italy is still missing, as an independent state. There is unity of customs amid the variety of political forms. A unity to which France, with the diffusion of its idiom, gives the appearance of linguistic unity. And already a movement of ideas toward a more conscious unity is noticeable.

Akin to the theory of equilibrium, which presupposes equality of forces, is the struggle against every idea of primacy that emerges here and there in certain writers of the eighteenth century, an idea that is a prejudice hostile to a European federation.

When Vico dedicates his first New Science "to the Academies of E.", he makes a public acknowledgment of that cultural unity which he discerned in the E. of his time,
and shows that he has a clear concept of E.
But it is still wholly and strictly united with and dependent upon Christianity. European civilization, for Vico, is the civilization of Christian E., "by virtue of the Christian religion." He writes: "Christian E. shines with such humanity, that it abounds in all the goods that can make human virtue happy, no less for the comforts of the body than for the pleasures of the mind as of the soul." But this Vichian observation of a civil primacy of E., conceived globally, excludes the idea of particular primacies, of national hegemonies, which Vico considers an offense against spiritual unity. He censures the arrogance of nations and with good reason, all being equally indebted for their civil patrimony to a single generating principle, Christianity. And the idea made headway. A Swiss, Gian Giorgio Zimmermann, in 1758 published a work of great renown: Von Nationalstölze ("On National Pride"): here every presumption of primacy, as a denial of human brotherhood, is condemned. In the same humanitarian climate are born the projects of Kant, of Rousseau, of Saint-Pierre, of the abbot Scipione Piattoli, to place all E. under shelter from wars.

Meanwhile the Enlightenment works to overthrow the old regime in all its traditional content of maxims and beliefs.

But the eighteenth-century myth of a natural reason sovereign over the world, of a natural goodness of man and of a new world wholly free and happy through the lights of "raison raisonnante," also prepares confidence in the possibilities of organizing E. within perennial forms of a peaceful and beneficent international solidarity, and detaches the idea of E. from the conception of the "respublica christiana" and its religious foundations.

And it is France that presumes in the 18th century to be able to represent E. and to be all of E. with its culture, its books, its popularizing genius, and also with its laws.

In 1783 Rivarol writes: "Le temps semble être venu, de dire le monde français, comme autrefois le monde romain." It was the time of the great inventors of the European spirit and of the esprit de société, of an E. associated culturally and civically, an immense republic of letters and arts: from Voltaire to the abbot Galiani, from Verri to Beccaria, from the prince de Ligne to Goethe, from Montesquieu and Fonte-

noble, a strong handful of thinkers travel the roads of E. carrying everywhere the exaltation of European man, as an active, progressive, sociable, industrious being, master of science and art.

And these premises, which already make E. a psychological reality and France a mediator of knowledge, prelude to the crucial 1789. But when the French Revolution, contradicting its maxims of liberty and returning to the foreign-policy traditions of Louis XIV, becomes Napoleonism, with unlimited aspirations to conquest, E. opposes it with the force of seven coalitions, organized and fueled by England. Once again a European collectivity rises up to defend the liberty of individuals from Caesarian overreach, and once again there is a return to the idolatry of equilibrium.

Napoleon, even in his delirium of universal monarchy, wanted to make posterity believe that he had cherished in his soul a vast design for peace: the confederation of peoples, the creation of a new European system, "a single code, a European Court of Cassation, the same laws, the same currency, the same measures," and a federal congress like the American one.

The Corsican drew on the ideologies of the enlightened and cosmopolitan century. This unity of life, with its fixation on equality and fraternity, was also somewhat the ideal of the Revolution. But Napoleon went further still. Judging E. a rat's nest, in his imagination he crossed the Urals and scattered his dreams in the immense expanse of Asia. Metternich too looked beyond the Habsburg frontiers; he thought of an ordering of E., but departing from the schemes of French democracy, which he distrusted as dangerous to the discipline of the people and to the free activity of police governments.

IV. IN THE CONTEMPORARY AGE

These precedents, drawn somewhat from the haze of utopianism (Campanella is an old precursor), must not be lost. The Congress of Vienna was held to be the most shameful market of territories, under appearances of justice, and the most criminal outrage against every reasonable national aspiration of peoples. But the Holy Alliance, which has nothing in common with the treaty of 1815, stands by itself, just as the Declaration of the Rights of Man does with respect to the French Revolution; it proceeds from a fundamental concept that is good and progressive: it is a kind of international creed, which recognizes the need for a permanent and normal institution as arbitration in the internal conflicts of every State of Europe, and reveals the sense of a responsibility of European order, felt by certain diplomats, and the intention of creating among the powers a common will to act effectively against the renewal of disorders.

A European conscience of a conservative character, informed by the principles of the old regime, not the offspring of a unitary concept of Europe such as had been evolving over the last fifty years of history. Tsar Alexander, a curious mixture of despot, mystic and liberal, dreamed of uniting "all the powers of Europe in a single league," of placing the new European order under the immediate and high sovereignty of Jesus Christ, considering himself the founder of the European federation.

Madame de Staël noted at the time that people were beginning "to think in European terms." And so thought Henri de Saint-Simon, but with the principles of '89, when he called for the formation of a new feeling of fatherland, "le patriotisme européen"; and in the fervent pages of De la réorganisation de la société européenne (Paris 1814), written in collaboration with Augustin Thierry, he hailed in Charlemagne the first and true organizer of European society, already mature, after so many centuries of disastrous wars, to constitute a single political body with full independence of the various nations; to the concept of a political alliance among several States, he proposed substituting the notion of a "Society of European States" having a European parliament, charged with above all solve the problems of labor, favoring them with colonial expansion. And only in this way did Saint-Simon see the possibility of preserving for E. its hegemony over the world, the one that it has really lost by persisting in internal hegemonic conflicts.

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Now the idea took on a great development. The love of peace was oriented in that direction, also in Italy, where war with the foreigner was awaited and was being prepared. Luigi Andrea Mazzini in the work De l'Italie dans les rapports avec la liberté et la civilisation moderne (Paris 1847), maintains that an impulse of an associative nature comes almost spontaneously from European civilization itself as the fruit of general cooperation and a cohesive force in itself. He nevertheless excludes Russia from the new political system, which he considers extraneous to Western liberalism, the basis of associationism.

G. Mazzini, whom Morandi defines as the most Italian among European spirits and the most European of Italians, in the spring of 1834 symbolically establishes Young E. in Bern, in the presence of 18 young people from different nations: "for the good of humanity the nations unite in a pact of defense, of succor, of brotherhood." Mazzini too, like Saint-Simon, unites the political motive and the social one, for a complete reform of European life. Carlo Cattaneo reaffirms the concept in 1848: "We will have peace only when we have the United States of E."

He is echoed in Germany by Fleck, Blum, Vogh; in France, by Victor Hugo at the inaugural session of the Congress for Peace (August 1849), with words that had a European resonance.

The idea, having entered the congresses, found in these the easiest means of popularity. A second Congress in Geneva in 1867, with the participation of Garibaldi, inaugurates the formula "United States of E." and calls for the creation of an international arbitration. Shortly afterward, in 1868, there was talk there of a "Federation of the peoples of E." in homage to Switzerland. Then a great number of pacifist congresses at which the way of reconciling the sovereignty of individual States with European union was studied; and from time to time waves of pacifism, but in a purely lyrical form, which radiated from the sessions of the Hague Conference, promoted by the Russia of Nicholas II, which had set out toward great social and humanitarian reforms, after the emancipation of the serfs decreed in 1861 by Alexander II.

It is the Congress of 1867 that gives life to a newspaper Le Etats Unis d'Europe, though with a small circulation. But a beneficial, continuous action is that of Geneva. In order to give this newborn European consciousness concrete manifestations in the institutional and welfare order, Switzerland, placed in the middle of four great nations, and privileged with a polyglot character, not only takes care to safeguard its own neutrality, but to be the link between the different States of E., with the right of asylum so advantageous to political exiles, with the tenacious struggle of thought against the evils of war, and with the creation of numerous international offices for peace and international conventions of the same tenor. Notable is the one in favor of the wounded of war (29 Aug. 1864) and later still more notable the International Labor Office (1901) composed of delegates from the different nations.

But the great idea has a curious destiny, imposed by the political circumstances of E.: it awakens at every phase of war, it dozes off in the parentheses of peace. At the very beginnings of Bismarck's chancellorship (1862), his policy, which he declares averse to sentimentalism, arouses grave concerns, and the peace movement becomes intense. Napoleon III opposes him, the sentimental politician destined to be the greatest victim of Bismarck: in 1863 he proposes the convocation of a European congress to create the bases of perpetual peace. An anti-historical utopia, while Italy was working to obtain its own unity and independence hoping for a European conflict. Nevertheless the idea makes progress and culminates in 1870 in the appeals of Renan, which seemed the weeping of the French raised over the disasters of that year. Then, armed peace until 1914 and the vertiginous growth of armaments. Whoever was not to be ruined by war was ruined in the to prepare for it. After 1870, apart from the Balkan wars and the war in Manchuria, there were only colonial expeditions. But the principal powers did not renounce their warlike ambitions, maintaining themselves in a kind of peaceful equilibrium that suddenly underwent dangerous alterations. The system of blocs prevailed over the ideal of a society of nations. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy determined the Franco-Russian alliance, and then the Franco-British entente for colonialist purposes, followed later by the Italo-British and Italo-French ententes.

The education of humanity still labored greatly to accomplish itself. People talked, wrote, met one another, but nothing positive was done. The first Peace Conference, convened at The Hague in 1899 on the initiative of Nicholas II, had no practical result, not even regarding the problem of disarmament, which seemed to be its greatest aspiration.

Discussion then continued in the individual countries, but the discussion served only to create discord among opinions. The idea of unity was rejected in favor of that of union; no longer even a federation of peoples, but of States.

The Spanish-American War and the Russo-Japanese War widened the field of observation, the advisability of international understandings.

The idea, confined to Europe, was to be extended to the other continents, America and Japan. The history of Europe disappeared into that of the world. Colonial expansion, aggravated by the conflicts over Morocco and by the Agadir incident with the danger of a European conflagration, helped this dissolution of Europeanism into a globalism.

The Great War, which broke the Bismarckian equilibrium that had lasted 43 years, ended by the American intervention, reawakens the ideal of European unity, under the impulses of Woodrow Wilson, who left hopes for the pacifist miraculousness of a League of Nations. But this responded to a spiritual state connected with recent memories of war, and as it was born, so it died. From the war the old nationalisms emerged strengthened, and the idea of European unity gave way to the idea of the eighteenth-century equilibrium. People continued to believe in the myth of armed forces, and after William II came Hitler, who believed he could impose German hegemony over Europe by that means. And then, after the ruins of war, no longer only on land but in the air, there was a fresh start with talk of a European Federation and of the United States of Europe, in European conferences, in world journals, in diplomatic meetings. It took various forms of high culture and popular culture, from l'esprit international, in which Carlo Sforza carried on a notable activity during his voluntary exile, to the suggestive pages of E. The latter is a careful political review directed by Pier Fausto Palumbo; it is the most active organ of the problem. The review is published in Rome and is the voice that represents Italy in the European movement. But from Rome the action of the Vatican develops — and the frequent messages of the Pontiff are its unmistakable seal — which in the name of Christ welcomes the new forms of human solidarity. Publicity events have not been lacking in recent years, in order to obtain a more intense Europeanist action, validated by its own educational and cultural organs. The first congress of the "Union européenne des Fédéralistes", between 27 and 30 Aug. 1947, closed with the proposal to establish a "Centre fédéraliste d'éducation et de culture" in Geneva. The following year, at the Hague Conference, from which the "Movimento europeo" was to be born, the same necessity was affirmed, and its name was specified: "Centre européen de la Culture". But only in 1949, at Lausanne, from 8 to 12 Dec., did the idea receive a more concrete expression in the Lausanne Congress, with a precise questionnaire, carefully considered reports and working commissions divided into various sections, each with precise aims, but always in an ideological and somewhat abstract field, sown with good intentions that have before them no real hopes of being translated into political forces and put into effect. The Gospel calls upon men of good will, and these are still lacking when man takes on a political guise.

A recent difficulty, of no small weight, is given by the conception of a Russia that is not Europe but Asia. It arose in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, in a communist sense, and of the subsequent isolation of its regime, so different from that of the rest of Europe. An old denomination is reborn, the West, as a synonym for Europe, since only the western part is regarded as the true Europe, the one still closely bound to the history of so many centuries. This narrowing of the idea of Europe, and the growing differentiation of the two sides, West and East, determine a crisis of no small moment and grave doubts about the solidity of Western civilization, threatened by the contagion of another civilization that is not European.

A European consciousness, in order to leave the sphere of poetry and enter that of reality, presupposes a precise knowledge of the irrepressible needs of the various peoples, and the disposition not to repress them but to satisfy them rationally and peacefully.

V. CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC THOUGHT

This presupposes, practically, that, at the close of an armed conflict, a peace is not signed imposed with a wartime mentality, destined to leave in the hearts of the vanquished motives for provocation and desires for revenge, but conducted with a spirit of peace, capable of preventing new causes of friction. Therefore it is necessary that humanity return to universal principles of justice. There is a tradition of Christian thought also with respect to the problem of European unity; and in this thought alone are those principles contained.

One finds it expressed above all by Antonio Rosmini, by Vincenzo Gioberti, by the pontiffs of the 19th century, and in more concrete form by the work and writings of Benedict XV.

The idea of E. is always alive in the two great philosophers who made their own, together with the love of God, the passion of the Risorgimento; and the dream of Italian independence is accompanied by the aspiration toward European unity, as this is seen in function of that.

For Rosmini European unity already exists as a unity of civilization and of history, ever since Christianity reached the soul of the barbarians: but every attempt to substitute a new law for that of Christ, from which the «respublica christiana» was born, has failed: whether the formula of a hegemony, or that inspired by a policy of equilibrium. A good rule of coexistence among the States of E. cannot be based on law, segregated from religion; and this understanding, according to Rosmini, as an interior fact, manifesting itself in the morality and justice of actions as of international relations.

Gioberti too draws the concept of European unity from the commonality of civilization and of history, deduced from the traditions of Rome and from Christianity, but within the framework of the independence of each nation. He wants Italy free so that it may carry out its mission of universal Christian monarchy, starting from E. and embracing here the whole of humanity in the task of bringing peoples together as brothers under the arbitration of the pontiff, light and guide of evangelical persuasion, supreme judge of the nations.

«E. - says Gioberti - needs its politics to become a religion - that to international law it substitute Christian law: that to the pontiff be conferred the power of pacification by harmonizing the ends that every nation must pursue, around an end of general harmony that surpasses the interest of every single State with the very interest of the fraternity of peaceful existence.

During the First and Second World Wars, these maxims were not only repeated but translated into the reality of international life by the work of the pontiffs, by their encyclicals, by the frequent appeals to the peoples and governments of E., by the numerous initiatives to alleviate the sorrows of war. It suffices to recall the encyclical Pacem Dei munus of 23 May 1920. - See 1899. LII-LV.

Ettore Rosa