EUROPE – Austria. Wayside shrine with eternal light. Church of St Mary-Saal (diocese of Gurk). Fossil fuels of iron. Before the war, this small continent supplied, among other things, 45% of the world’s coal and pig iron and over 40% of its steel. Moreover, it held a monopoly over certain raw materials (e.g., graphite and magnesium), while for those in short supply (e.g., copper, zinc, tin, lead, and silver) or essential to its industry, it could rely on supplies from colonial countries. The contraction that followed the war appears all the more pronounced because the preparation and conduct of the conflict had already intensified the pace of extractive activity. Nevertheless, recovery has been rapid, as shown by industrial production indices, which these raw materials both determine and sustain.
At equal surface area, European space has been and remains the most densely industrialized in the world. The greatest expansion of industry coincides with the most compact concentration of population: two circumstances that are evidently interdependent. Thus the center of gravity of modern large-scale industry essentially coincides with the regions of central Europe, from the Seine to the Elbe, from the Rhône to the Danube, from the North Sea to the Po, as well as with southern Britain. Characteristic of the postwar period, however, has been the rapid development of new industrial centers in certain sectors of the European part of the U.S.S.R. (Ukraine, central Russia, the lower Volga, the Urals, and central and southern regions), alongside the progressive decline of artisan production.
Industrial output, disrupted by the war, has nearly everywhere regained or is regaining its prewar levels, though without restoring to the continent the role it once held in international trade. Whereas in 1923 European imports and exports represented
Europe was slow to be conceived as an organic whole—whether geographical or historical—or as a distinct entity in contrast to other continents such as Asia or Africa. European civilization first emerged in Greece with its city-states, whether democratic or militaristic, each jealously guarding its independence yet driven by a will to supremacy. The Greeks felt superior to other peoples, whom they contemptuously labeled “barbarians.” They thus possessed a Hellenic rather than a European consciousness; yet they anticipated the republican tendency of future Europe, that is, the limitation of central political power in favor of local and individual freedoms—a contrast to Asiatic despotism. Greece defended these freedoms against Asiatic imperialism, but the struggle against Persia ultimately weakened it and delivered it into the hands of the Macedonian princes, who, under Alexander the Great, carried the originality of Athenian culture and thought as far as the Indus River.
The Hellenic world expanded, yet its geographical breadth itself impeded a European conception, just as the expansion of the Roman world did. The former straddled Europe and Asia, particularly under the empire of Alexander the Great, which rested upon multiple capitals—Athens, Pergamon, Rhodes, Alexandria—while the latter encompassed only part of Europe, up to the Rhine-Danube line, along with parts of Asia and Africa. A European consciousness could not arise from such multi-continental or intercontinental expanses. Greece, by contrast, nurtured a presumptuous self-awareness, opposing itself to all non-Greeks, who were relegated to the great family of barbarians. Hellenism was all of Europe; Greece was the sole homeland of the human spirit, the sole civilized value of its time. For three centuries, Europe was synonymous with Greece. The European problem was rather seen as an Asiatic one—namely, liberation from all Eastern interference. This is the impression conveyed by Herodotus, Isocrates, and Theopompus. Isocrates perceived Greece in the Europe-Asia contrast, especially after the Peace of Antalcidas in 387 BC, which assigned Greek cities in Asia to the Persian king; yet the opposition remained between Greek and non-Greek, between Greek and barbarian. It was precisely then, for the first time, that Lysander, faced with the duality of the Greek world divided between European and Asiatic lands, spoke of a European policy and an Asiatic policy, urging Philip II to launch an expedition into Asia to restore Europe’s superiority over Asia. He even favored accepting Philip’s supremacy in order to free Greece from Persian yoke. The same theme recurs in the writings of the sculptor Theopompus, who advised Philip II to create a great European state capable of balancing the great Asiatic state of Persia. Thus Europe was conceived within the framework of Persia.
The Roman age lacked the concept of Europe; it operated within the Mediterranean sphere, of which Europe was merely a part. Yet Rome had a clear consciousness of Italy as both a geographical and historical entity, with traditions that united all Italians around Rome as their common center.
The Social War, as narrated by Livy, provides clear evidence of this: the new capital named “Italia” served as a warning to Rome, which had disdained solidarity with the peoples of its own stock who had aided it in the conquest of the peninsula.
Caesar perceived the northern threat and, through his campaigns in Gaul, sought to give the peninsula a barrier to defend it along its western Alpine flank. As the republic became an empire, it retained the republican modalities of Greece, safeguarding individual rights and refining the system of public and private justice. Calls of disapproval arose against conquests beyond Italy, particularly from poets, even before Annaeus Florus condemned the entire imperial policy for its excessive expansionism. Conversely, praise was heaped upon those who had fortified the Alpine perimeter—“the bulwark of Italy,” “the wall of Italy,” as found in Polybius, Strabo, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, and many others.
Yet Rome could not halt at the borders of Italy or the lands of Europe. The persistent Persian threat, the
It drove itself to take up arms beyond the Bosporus, to become the heir of the political tradition of Alexander, to safeguard the precious heritage of Greek culture, accepting upon itself the burden of the Orient. The struggle against the king of Pontus received the grand day of Marathon and Salamis, on account of the nature of the relations between E. and Asia, which Mithridates brought back onto the Mediterranean scene. In 63 B.C. all Asia Minor obeyed Rome, and Rome was now facing the danger of suffering the influence of the Orient in its institutions and customs, that is, of introducing habits of despotism where there had been the idolatry of freedom. In this context, the personality of the European world, now represented by Rome as it had been by Greece before, was still keenly felt: Virgil paused in fear to meditate on these dangers in the famous passage of Aeneid I.8, where he shows the idols of the Orient arrayed against the Penates and the deities who guard the Roman state.
The victory of Octavian over Antony was hailed as the defence of Roman or European ideals of order and freedom from the threats of Oriental tyranny. The victory at Actium prolonged to European civilization the benefits and enlightenment of Hellenic culture. Then Rome had a truly European mission: to introduce the urban element, unknown to the Germans, into the northern lands, that city which provided the fundamental structure even to European civilization itself, which in the Middle Ages was still bound to the municipality and to the Church.
In the imperial age, the nascent religion of Christ reached the borders of the empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, sustained by the favour of the supreme authority of the state, and it came to oppose and surpass the old pagan religion.
The Church gradually passed from being persecuted to being tolerated, and from tolerated to dominant. To it belonged the direction of moral and social life. The Caesars abandoned the ancient title of Pontifex Maximus, which instead passed to the bishop of Rome, to whom primacy over other bishops was acknowledged, while the capital of the Empire became the centre of the Catholic Church. The Empire dissolved, the Church organized itself. The priesthood tenaciously appropriated and preserved Latin, even when it declined as a vernacular tongue. Peoples began to differentiate themselves by their varying attitudes towards the Church, which prepared to penetrate the barbarian phalanxes to tame them, to win them to Christianity, to preserve the concept of unity, and to spread the use of Roman law together with a higher ideal of humanity, justice, and goodness.
The barbarian invasions shattered the work of Romanization. With the beginning of the reign of Odoacer in 476 A.D., those many elements of European unity which the Rome of the Caesars had succeeded in composing up to the line of the Rhine were dissolved, and Europe, prey to the various Germanic tribes, moved towards becoming a mass of small kingdoms. But another unity was arising, founded on the religious motive.
IN THE MIDDLE AGES. — At first it seemed that the contrast between European and non-European should cease forever, since the religion of Christ transcended territorial and racial differences but aspired to the unity of the human race under a single spiritual head with a tendency to become temporal: the papal theocracy. But the Church was in reality the only organism that extended its authority and capacity for life across European soil without political limitations imposed by the barbarian kingdoms. Through the work of the Church, the Hellenic spirit endured; whoever accepted its dogmas was a civilized man; the unbeliever was the barbarian who had to convert if he wished to rise to the heights of new moral values.
With good historical foundation, G. Schnürer was able to establish that the constituent elements of the ancient world, endowed with intrinsic and lasting value, survived thanks to the great Christian family, which assimilated them and made them serve to bind together the various peoples of Europe when it ran the risk of becoming a vast barbarian wasteland.
The ancient Roman virtues, practical sense, the genius for organization, activity, the art of leading men and gathering them within the light of an ordered principle, coordinated with an eternal purpose, formed the qualities of the Church of Rome, which, in place of the arid, inconsistent, and immoral cult of Augustus, substituted the penetrative and cohesive force of the evangelical doctrine, evangelizing all of Europe and impressing upon Western civilization an unmistakably unitary imprint which was to conquer the rest of the world.
From the 5th century, the triumphal hymn of the Church, the Te Deum, at least in its primitive form, resounded beneath the vaults of cathedrals and with its manifest notes began the work of elevating the masses, no longer dispersed like flocks in the countryside. Across all the lands won to the cult of the Cross, the sublime song of gratitude, invocation, and prayer echoed. Sacred music descended into hearts, spoke to feeling, met the sins and sorrows of the old collapsing society, and with its own words, together with its notes of tenderness and love, united the scattered populace and suggested precepts of life and means of expiation. It was always an effectively unifying action.
Therefore, in the great variety of peoples occupying Europe, the Church represented the only European reality, unitary even in the language it used—the message of believers, the unique means of intellectual cooperation and vehicle of ancient culture even for the new peoples of the continent. The term of differentiation, therefore, was Christianitas or Ecclesia; the universitas ecclesiastica, which is the basis of medieval political thought, absorbed within itself every new and possible conception of Europe. And with the spread of Christianity among the barbarians, it can be said that the medieval European unity was the creation of the Christian Church. It spread its missionaries and monks into every corner of the old continent to make known to all the northern, Germanic, or Slavic peoples the message of the Gospel. It prepared their fusion through spiritual elements: the commonality suggested by faith in Christ, a shared conception of the divine and the human, of guilt and forgiveness, of sin and expiation, of duty and right; it was the new European unity achieved through a progressive drawing together of all souls at the foot of the altar before the image of the Crucified.
Even sacred art, together with liturgical music, collaborates in the creation of a European organism that has uniformity of life in taste, custom, and devotion to the deity. It is a single phalanx of builders, the magistri comacini, who, setting out from the shores of Lake Como, emigrate to the farthest points of Europe, scattering along their path the austere basilicas in the Romanesque style, which revive human communities where war has passed with its ruins, while a history studded with bishops, monks, and saints unfolds—these figures who assist, protect, and direct the moral reconstruction. When one encounters a church in Germany, in France, or in Norway, on the threshold of the Sarmatian plain, one encounters Italy. Art that is heavy, strong, and rough as the times demand, far removed from the bold realism of classical art, yet suited to meditation and recollection upon the frightened earth of barbarism, where, through the work of religious architecture, confidence in the goodness of men is reborn through God’s forgiveness. The people identify with the Church, which, rising everywhere with the same architecture—severe and austere, whether at the edge of tombs or in the open atmosphere of the countryside—speaks to all in a single language, both human and divine.
Little by little, the European world is no longer divided into barbarians and non-barbarians, but is constituted of believers in Christ; a presupposition for a religious consciousness that tends to create political unity, according to the medieval idea of the *ordinatio ad unum* of the entire Christian republic, *unum populus*, one city, the *corpus mysticum*.
In the 11th century, the religious bond that held East and West together was broken; the Byzantine Church, increasingly tied to the Empire of Constantinople, became entirely estranged from the Church of Rome. European Christendom emerged more clearly as a religious entity, culturally separated from the Eastern world, and could more actively turn toward the conversion of the northern countries, where the Vikings still offered tenacious resistance; but soon Rome won them over to the Christian faith.
**EUROPE – Germany.** Cross raised on the mountains of Ammergau.
Invested in the Germanic dynasties, they had the task of elaborating a European consciousness that was to consider in common accord the religious unity with the tertiary and political unity of Europe. The Islamic conquest shifted the old centers of Mediterranean unity. Yet it is still the Catholic idea that is the conservative element of Europe, which it defends by safeguarding the traditional faith.
The great struggle dreamed of as the battle of the Lord and the *proelium Domini* was broken into individual episodes, losing its original character as a united front for the cause of God on behalf of Christ, whose temple had been profaned on the roads of the Holy Land; nonetheless, even local personal impulses were composed into unity by the virtue of that religious soul that lay within and gave all a common meaning: to ensure the existence and freedom of a Christian and Roman Europe within the sacred circle of its borders.
Therefore, the Crusades—works of knights, pilgrims, princes, nobles, and common people coming from all points of the old continent—elaborated a European consciousness within the framework of shared religiosity. The initiative of a world enterprise by the pope was crowned by the surprising response of Europe to the appeal of Urban II, expressed by the mighty cry: “God wills it!” and by the departure of about 200,000 toward the distant East, of whom no more than 50,000 arrived. If there was not yet in this sacrifice a clear unitary sentiment, there was nonetheless an awareness of a danger that loomed over all at that very 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 in the vanguard of modern history. Their independence was only vaguely shadowed by an imperial guardianship that gradually faded and lost its authority. Binding forces were ecclesiastical culture, the first colonization of the Maritime Republics of Italy, the Crusades, and, as a consequence, commercial exchanges and banking services that broadened the horizon and urban activity, drawing the Roman Mediterranean closer to the Baltic. The Peruzzi of Florence arrived with their banking representatives even at the court of London; the Bank of San Giorgio reached as far as Madrid on the western side and the ports of the Black Sea on the Asian front. Thus, European unity was strengthened by an economy and a European cooperation.
### III. IN THE MODERN AGE
The European unity expressed by medieval theocracy now suffers violent ruptures.
Constantinople—the second eye of Europe—fell into Turkish hands, complicating the Balkan situation and the destiny of Europe and reducing the domain of the Christian idea. Part of Europe was linked to Asia as during the crisis of Greek civilization. Yet the fall of Constantinople also provoked a revival of religious combativeness against the spread of Turkish danger in Hungary, Transylvania, the Danubian countries, and Poland, which became bulwarks of European unity under the sign of the Cross of Christ.
Europe, made manifold by the variety of national monarchies, remained one through the fundamental solidarity born of common religion and hatred of the infidel. The combative spirit of the old Crusade continued under the banner of Christ and the guidance of the papacy, which renewed its attempt to save the Holy Places for Europe until the battle of Lepanto. The last crusader, Christopher Columbus, who unconsciously opened to the Old Continent new tasks of labor and wealth, and to the Church new lands to convert.
The Lutheran Reformation dealt a hard blow: it was a reaction to the unifying policy of the papacy, to which Rome’s great enemy opposed the dissolving force of religious individualism and Germanic individualism. It was the first explosion of nationalist sentiment in contrast with the European spirit in its form of theocracy as elaborated by the Middle Ages. National individualism became religious individualism. Indeed, with 1520, the glorious epoch closed in which a single spiritual power was recognized everywhere.
Yet Humanism, which asserted itself as a love of the ancient but grafted onto medieval Faith, accepted the battle; in the duel between Erasmus and Luther, the contrast is summarized between the unitary conception of Latin culture, reinforced by the unity of Faith, and the new ideal of the national Church and of culture founded upon a Germanic tradition.
Humanism, though originating in Italy as its native land, asserted itself in its subsequent development as a European phenomenon, so that once again, whoever
It clashes with Humanism on the soil of Europe, centered in Italy. The Church had unified; the Renaissance, whose patrons and promoters include the popes, continues the unifying work. The sense of harmonious balance and wise concord, the will to reconcile, the furious discordia concors, 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 representations, in the exaltation of nature, in the effort to achieve, with new methods not alien to the medieval, the unity of Faith and knowledge, of theology and philosophy; thus, alongside aesthetic values, moral and religious values are given importance, and Renaissance comes to signify regeneration, the exaltation of man in the exaltation of God. Humanism imposes a uniform style on the arts and the process of the spirit: in Rome, Florence, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, the conception of the world presents itself renewed in the same way. Humanism is Europe, all of Europe, in a rediscovered harmony between the dignity of man and the sublimity of God.
In the excerpt that provokes the rupture of religious unity, classical art offers all its comfort of lights and colors, of realism and naturalism to enrich with beauty and vitality the aspects of the Christian creed, while the humanist sees Europe as the assembly of the learned who love classical texts and art in this reborn form.
Gradually, even a Germanic Humanism reconstructs the bridge that Luther has broken, and Latin culture remains the cohesive element of European civilization. With the Portuguese discoveries, Europe 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 renewed breadth in the world; beyond the oceans, the renewed Church unfolds another history of conquest. The new empire of Charles V arises by papal investiture, and the Habsburgs condemn Lutheranism. The Renaissance period also gives us a clear conception of Europe as having its own political, moral, and traditional personality.
It is Machiavelli who judges it an unmistakable entity compared to the other continents. In his Discourses on War, he proposes not to exceed the boundaries of Europe and not to justify what is customary in Asia, because he perceives a profound difference between Asia and Europe: the former, enslaved to despotic forms, the latter always intent on defending the benefits of freedom and sometimes even republican virtue. Christopher Columbus plays no small part in renewing the world of opinions and interests. The discovery of America is the knowledge of lands populated by savages, while it better defines the Old Continent, helping the European to distinguish himself even more brightly as a superior civil complex compared to other peoples. It seems incredible to the learned humanists, who pride themselves on being the heirs of ancient greatness, to have found other peoples to whom they can apply the epithet of barbarians to better ennoble their own culture and all the European civilization that depends on II.
And since the struggle against the Islamic peril was not concluded by the Crusades, the idea of Europe is further clarified by opposing itself to the concept of Turks, Moors, Infidels. Therefore, in the Renaissance, the name of Europe is accompanied by an awareness of the necessity of the holy war against the Infidel. Anti-Europe at that moment is embodied in the Turk. Thus Tasso takes as his theme “the effort of Europe” that has turned in unison to a Christian act of faith (*Gerusalemme liberata*, I, 24), and urges his prince to such an enterprise because “in peace... the good people of Christ... may see themselves.” Even Ariosto, abandoning his mocking tone, seriously laments the state of Europe, torn by internal hostilities, which delays the fight for the freedom of the Holy Places. The European vision persists within the medieval conception of *Christianitas*.
The struggle for hegemony in Italy, a condition for prevailing over all, is repeated many times and is characteristic of modern Europe. But the reaction is equally insistent in restoring balance, that is, a certain constancy in the relationship of the forces composing the continuous system. It is a dynamic, not static, equilibrium, achieved with general advantages, almost all at Italy’s expense.
The first effort for European hegemony is made by France, through Charles VIII and then Louis XI. The second is the one suborned by Charles V and Philip I, Spain and the Empire, contested by France with Francis I and then with Henry II. The entire 16th century is filled with this war. Italy falls into servitude. But there is much passivity even among the victors.
Spain fails in its bold attempt to dominate France and England, and from the ruins of its ephemeral grandeur a new power will arise: the United Provinces of Holland.
In the following century, Ferdinand II, making extensive use of the crusade against heresy, aims to subjugate the German states that had separated from the Church of Rome, and opens the Thirty Years’ War, but with an unhappy outcome.
The alliance of France under Richelieu with the Protestant princes confirms the freedom of conscience in 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 in the ambition for European primacy.
But with Louis XIV, the Sun King, France returns to the offensive against the Netherlands and the Rhine, then against Italy and Spain, with the intention of replacing Habsburg hegemony with its own. The rivalry among Paris, Madrid, and Vienna fills three centuries of European life. In these continental events, England, having abandoned its aspirations toward France after the inconclusive outcome of the Hundred Years’ War, takes an ever more lively interest in the destiny of Europe and secures the separation of the two crowns, of France and 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 balance of power in Europe. But in this game, France and England alternate. Indeed, both come to perceive the common interest of all Europe that Italy be freed from servitude, to remove from European ambitions what is the element of discord and the principal cause of repeated wars of preponderance in Europe.
This very new idea begins to emerge from the laborious discussions of the Congresses of Utrecht and Rastatt, and then from the peace treaties that follow the wars of Polish and Austrian succession, in which Italy was always the object of territorial rearrangements.
When, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the anti-European motif arises, nourished by the exaltation of savages as beings untroubled by the evils of civilization, it too helps, by a play of contrasts, to better study the European, thus to better know him, as can be seen in Montesquieu, who employs this method to define what is specifically European.
Thus, in the final reckoning, the modern age, despite initially passive factors, later values the European entity as a whole, succeeding in flattering national ideals and the unitarian European tendencies.
But the idea of the nation also operates with its own forces, which are especially evident in the pursuit of European hegemony after achieving national independence; this runs counter to the formation of a European consciousness that can only coexist on the basis of equality and mutual respect, despite disparities in strength. Nation against nation, the will to preponderance over the whole of Europe—these are the first great acts of war in the modern age. Yet the principle of balance, intended to prevent any one state from becoming territorially stronger than another so as not to endanger the independence of individual states, becomes the guiding norm of the new European politics. It determines the formation of leagues and counter-leagues, of small and great alliances that serve as 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 balance. The attempt made by
to achieve public recognition of that cultural unity which he perceived in the Europe of his time reveals a clear concept of Europe. Yet it remains entirely and strictly dependent on Christianity. For Vico, European civilization is the civilization of Christian Europe, by virtue of the Christian religion. He writes: “Christian Europe overflows with such humanity that it abounds in all the goods that can bring happiness to human virtue, not only in bodily comforts but also in the pleasures of the mind and soul.” Yet this Vichian observation of a civil primacy of Europe, conceived as a whole, excludes the idea of particular primacies or national hegemonies, which Vico considers an offense to spiritual unity. He condemns the arrogance of nations, and with good reason, since all are equally indebted to a single generative principle, Christianity, for their civil heritage. And the idea gained ground. A Swiss writer, Gian Giorgio Zimmermann, published in 1758 a work of great renown, *Non Nationaliste* (“On National Pride”), in which he condemns every presumption of primacy that denies human brotherhood. In the same humanitarian climate, the projects of Kant, Rousseau, Saint-Pierre, and the Abbé Scipione Piattoli arose, aiming to shield all of Europe from war.
Meanwhile, the Enlightenment worked to dismantle the ancien régime in all its traditional content of maxims and beliefs.
But the eighteenth-century myth of a sovereign natural reason, of a natural goodness of man, and of a new world entirely free and happy through the lights of “raison raisonnante” also fostered confidence in the possibility of organizing Europe within the personal forms of a peaceful and beneficial international solidarity. It detached the idea of Europe from the conception of the *Respublica Christiana* and its religious foundations.
It was France that in the 18th century presumed to represent Europe and to be all of Europe through its culture, its books, its genius for popularization, and even through its laws.
In 1783, Rivarol wrote: “The time seems to have come to speak of the French world, as once of the Roman world.” It was the age of the great inventors of the European spirit and of *l’esprit de société*, of a Europe united culturally and civilly, an immense republic of letters and arts: from Voltaire to the Abbé Galiani, from Verri to Beccaria, from the Prince de Ligne to Goethe, from Montesquieu to Alfieri.
A foretaste of this grand idea, which would bring a revolution to European diplomacy, was the doctrinal experiments for the political organization of Italy: from that of Henry IV and Sully, formulated in 1601, to the later one, about a century and a half later, of the Marquis d’Argenson. Meanwhile, the European family grew by two new members: Prussia and Russia, destined to enter the ranks of the great powers. This was the product of a slow evolution, driven by the intervention of strong personalities, especially in Russia, which, because of its greater distance, struggled more to enter the orbit of European life. Frederick I and Peter the Great were the chief architects of Prussia’s and Russia’s rise in Europe. Catherine II, continuing Peter’s work, opened for Russia the path to the Mediterranean with Tauris, Sevastopol, and Odessa; her gaze extended even further, to Byzantium. Trieste compensated for the disappearance of Poland and the expulsion of Sweden from the Gulf of Finland.
The political personality of Europe was almost entirely formed in its multinational character. Italy was still lacking as an independent state. There was unity of customs amid the variety of political forms. This unity was given the appearance of linguistic unity by France through the spread of its language. And already a movement of ideas toward a more conscious unity could be discerned.
Closely related to the theory of balance, which presupposes equality of forces, was the struggle against every idea of primacy that emerged in some writers of the 18th century—an idea that was a prejudicial obstacle to a European federation.
When Vico dedicated his first *New Science* “to the Academies of Europe,”
the ordering of Europe, but departing from the models of French democracy, which he distrusted as dangerous to the discipline of the people and the free activity of police governments.
IV. IN THE CONTEMPORARY AGE
These precedents, drawn somewhat from the mists of utopianism (Campanella is an old precursor), were not lost. The Congress of Vienna was regarded as the most shameful trafficking in territories under the guise of justice, and the most criminal mutilation of every reasonable national aspiration of the peoples. Yet the Holy Alliance, which has nothing in common with the Treaty of 1815, was, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man in relation to the French Revolution, something new in a fundamental, progressive concept: it was a kind of international creed that recognized the need for a permanent and normal institution as an arbitrator in internal conflicts of every European state, and it revealed a sense of European responsibility felt by some diplomats and the intention to create among the powers a common will to act effectively against the recurrence of disorder.A conservative European consciousness, informed by the principles of the ancien régime and not the offspring of a unitary concept of Europe as it had evolved in the previous fifty years of history. Tsar Alexander, a curious blend of despot, mystic, and liberal, dreamed of uniting all the powers of Europe into a single league and placing the new European order under the immediate and lofty sovereignty of Jesus Christ, considering himself the founder of the European federation.
Madame de Staël then noted that people were beginning to think in European terms. And she thought so, but with the principles of 1789, when Henri de Saint-Simon advocated the formation of a new sense of homeland and a European patriotism; and in the impassioned pages of *De la réorganisation de la société européenne* (Paris, 1814), written in collaboration with Augustin Thierry, he hailed Charlemagne as 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 for the various nations. To the concept of a political alliance among states, he proposed substituting the notion of a “Society of European States” with a European parliament entrusted with
EUROPE — Romania. Church of Demsus (end of the 13th century).
In every land, a strong band of thinkers carried the exaltation of the European man—active, progressive, sociable, industrious, master of science and art—throughout Europe.
With these premises, EUROPE already becomes a psychological reality, and France a mediator of knowledge, on the eve of the crucial year 1789. But when the French Revolution, proclaiming its maxims of liberty and reverting to the traditions of foreign policy of Louis XIV, becomes Napoleonic imperialism with its boundless aspirations for conquest, EUROPE opposes it with the strength of seven coalitions, organized and sustained by England. Once again, a European collectivity arises to defend the freedom of individuals from renewed oppression; once again, the idol of the balance of power is invoked.
Napoleon, even in his delusion of a universal monarchy, wished posterity to believe that he had cherished in his soul a grand 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 that of America.”
The Corsican drew from the ideologies of the Enlightenment and cosmopolitan century. This unity of life, with its fixation on equality and fraternity, was also something of the Revolution’s ideal. But Napoleon went even further. Judging EUROPE a pigsty, he crossed the Urals in his imagination and dispersed his dreams across the vast expanses of Asia. Even Metternich looked beyond the borders of the Habsburg dominions, envisaging
EUROPE – Sweden. Castle of Vadstena. Pen drawing.
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the resolution, above all, of labor problems, fostering them through colonial expansion. Only in this way did SAINT-SIMON see the possibility of preserving EUROPE’s hegemony over the world, which it had truly lost by persisting in internal hegemonic conflicts.
Now the idea took on great momentum. The love of peace was directed toward this end, even in Italy, where war with foreigners was anticipated and preparations were underway. GIOVANNI ANDREA MAZZINI, in his work *De l’Italie dans ses rapports avec la liberté et la civilisation moderne* (Paris 1847), argued that an associative impulse arises almost spontaneously from European civilization itself, as a fruit of general cooperation and a cohesive force. He excluded, however, Russia from the new political system, deeming it alien to Western liberalism, the foundation of associationism.
G. MAZZINI, whom Morandi called “the most Italian of European spirits and the most European of Italians,” in 1864 (though symbolically founded in 1834) established the Young EUROPE in Bern, in the presence of eighteen young men of different nations: “for the good of humanity, the nations unite in a pact of defense, mutual aid, and brotherhood.” Like SAINT-SIMON, MAZZINI united the political motive with the social one, aiming at a complete reform of European life. CARLO CATTANEO reaffirmed the concept in 1848: “We shall have peace only when we have the United States of EUROPE.”
Echoes of this idea arose in Germany with FLECK, BLUM, and VOGHI; in France, VICTOR HUGO, in the opening session of the Peace Congress (August 1849), spoke words that resonated across Europe.
The idea, once introduced into congresses, found in them the most effective means of popularization. A second Geneva Congress in 1867, with the participation of GARIBALDI, inaugurated the formula “United States of EUROPE.” It called for the creation of an international arbitration system. Shortly afterward, in 1868, the phrase “Federation of European Peoples” was used. In homage to Switzerland, numerous pacifist congresses sought ways to reconcile the sovereignty of individual states with European union. From time to time, waves of pacifism—purely lyrical in form—radiated from the sessions of the Hague Conference, promoted by the Russia of NICHOLAS II, which had embarked on major social and humanitarian reforms following the emancipation of the serfs decreed by ALEXANDER II in 1861.
The Congress of 1867 gave rise to a newspaper, *Les États-Unis d’Europe*, though with limited circulation. Yet the beneficial and continuous action of Geneva was evident. To give this nascent European consciousness concrete institutional and welfare expression, Switzerland, situated between four great powers and blessed with a unique political character, not only safeguarded its neutrality but also served as a bridge between the various states of EUROPE. Through its right of asylum, so advantageous to political exiles, its tenacious intellectual struggle against the evils of war, and the creation of numerous international offices for peace and conventions of a similar nature, it played a pivotal role. Notable among these was the convention for the care of wounded soldiers (29 August 1864), and later, even more significant, the International Labour Office (1901), composed of delegates from various nations.
Yet the grand idea had a curious fate, dictated by Europe’s political circumstances: it awakened with every phase of war, only to wane during periods of peace. At the outset of Bismarck’s chancellorship (1862), his policy—declaredly devoid of sentiment—aroused grave concerns, and the peace movement intensified. It was opposed by NAPOLEON III, the sentimental politician destined to become Bismarck’s greatest victim: in 1863 he proposed convening a European congress to lay the foundations for perpetual peace. A utopian and ahistorical notion, while Italy labored to achieve its unity and independence, hoping for a European conflict. Nevertheless, the idea gained traction and culminated in 1870 with the appeals of RENAN, which seemed like the lament of the French over the disasters of that year. Then came the era of armed peace up to 1914, marked by a vertiginous arms race. Those who did not ruin themselves with war ruined themselves in
European thought yielded to the idea of the eighteenth-century balance of power. The myth of armed forces continued to be believed, and after William II, Hitler appeared to attempt to impose German hegemony over Europe by that means. Then, after the ruins of war—not only on land but in the air—there arose the idea of a European Federation and of the United States of Europe in the congresses of Europe, in world journals, and in diplomatic encounters. It took various forms of high culture and popular culture, from the *Esprit International*, where Carlo Sforza carried out notable activity during his voluntary exile, to the lively pages of *Europa*. The latter is a meticulous political review directed by Pier Fausto Palumbo; it is the most active voice of the European issue. The journal is published in Rome and represents Italy’s voice in the European movement. But from Rome, the action of the Vatican developed—and the frequent messages of the Pope provide a solid and enduring seal—welcoming, in the name of Christ, the new forms of human solidarity. Public demonstrations have not been lacking in recent years to obtain more intense European action, validated by its own educational and cultural bodies.
The first congress of the European Union, held in Rome on 27–30 August 1947, concluded with the proposal to establish a “Federal Centre of Education and Culture” in Geneva. The following year, at the Hague Conference, which gave birth to the “European Movement,” the same necessity was affirmed, and the name was specified: “European Centre of Culture.” But only in 1949, at Lausanne from 8 to 12 December, did the idea take a more concrete expression in the Lausanne Congress, with a precise questionnaire, well-considered reports, and working committees divided into various sections, each with specific aims, though still within an ideological and somewhat vague field, scattered with good intentions that do not yet have solid hopes of translating into effective political forces. The Gospel invokes men of good will; to these, however, there is still a lack when man assumes a political guise.
A recent difficulty, not without significance, arises from the conception of a Russia that is not Europe but Asia. This conception emerged following the Russian Revolution in a communist sense, and the subsequent isolation of its regime, so different from the rest of Europe. A old denomination is revived: the West, as a synonym for Europe, since only the western part is considered the true Europe, still closely tied to the history of so many eclectic traditions. This narrowing of the idea of Europe, and the growing differentiation between the two sides—West and East—determine a crisis of no small moment and serious doubts about the solidity of Western civilization, threatened by the division of another civilization that is not European.
A European consciousness, to move from the sphere of poetry into that of reality, presupposes a precise knowledge of the insuppressible needs of the various peoples, and the disposition not to suppress them but to satisfy them rationally and peacefully.
V. THE DEMOCRITIAN THOUGHT
This practically presupposes that, at the close of an armed conflict, peace should not be imposed with a warlike mentality, destined to leave in the hearts of the defeated motives for provocation and desires for revenge, but should be concluded with a spirit of peace capable of preventing new causes of friction. Therefore, it is necessary for humanity to return to universal principles of justice. There is a tradition of Christian thought regarding the problem of European unity; and it is in this thought alone that those principles are contained.This is found expressed above all by Antonio Rosmini, by Vincenzo Gioberti, and by the popes of the 19th century, in a more concrete form through the work and writings of Benedict XV.
The idea of Europe is ever alive in the two great philosophers who, with their love of God, embraced 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 history, since the time when Christianity reached the soul of the barbarians; but every attempt to replace a new law for that of Christ, from which the *respublica christiana* arose, has failed: whether in the form of hegemony or in one inspired by a policy of balance. A good rule of coexistence among the states of Europe cannot be based on law separated from religion; and this understanding, according to Rosmini, must be an interior fact, manifesting itself in the morality and justice of actions as well as of international relations.
Gioberti, too, derives the concept of European unity from the commonality of civilization and history, deduced from the traditions of Rome and Christianity, but within the framework of the independence of each nation. He desires a free Italy so that it may fulfill its mission of a universal Christian monarchy, moving from Europe and embracing all humanity in the task of uniting peoples under the arbitration of the Pope, light and guide of evangelical persuasion, supreme judge of nations.
“Europe,” says Gioberti, “needs its politics to become a religion”: that it should replace international law with Christian law; that the Pope should be invested with the power of pacification, harmonizing the ends that each nation must pursue around a goal of general harmony that surpasses the interests of each individual state with the very interest of fraternal peaceful existence.
During the First and Second World Wars, this mission was not only reiterated but translated into the reality of international life through the work of the popes, their encyclicals, their frequent appeals to the peoples and governments of Europe, and the numerous initiatives to alleviate the sufferings of war. Suffice it to recall the encyclical *Pacem Dei Munus* of 23 May 1920. — See plates LII–LV.