Anxiously awaiting the new Europe

A good case can be made for rewriting the history of Europe every 10 years. In the early 1980s, there was not much room for optimism. The economic situation was less than brilliant; the movement toward European unity had run out of steam; there was a feeling of gloom and doom: Hundreds of thousands were demonstrating against President Reagan, the warmonger, who was about to unleash Armageddon with his aggressive policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

Ten years later, the mood had radically changed. The economic outlook had improved; the Iron Curtain and the Wall had come down; there was a feeling of springtime in the air, even triumphalism. Triumphalism (in contrast to declinism) has negative connotations, but there was ground for satisfaction that a continent which had been at the end of its tether in 1945 had purged itself of the heritage of totalitarianism, had developed firmer democratic institutions than ever before, had resurrected itself from the ruins, had buried the hatchet. War in Europe seemed altogether absurd with only a few unpleasant exceptions at the far borders.

Viewed from the vantage point of 2003, the course of European history since the end of World War II seems much less sanguine. The economic situation has again deteriorated, and it now appears that the democratization and economic rebuilding of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union will take far longer than originally thought. Some of the deeper discontents of Europe, which were suppressed while the Cold War lasted, have now come to the fore as the immediate outside threats have seemingly disappeared. The weaknesses of Europe have become much clearer, and the limits of what has been achieved more distinct. Some writers point with admiration to the fact that the gross domestic product of the 15 states of the European Union has equaled and even overtaken that of the United States. But this is not quite correct -- at the present time growth rates in the United States are about three times higher than the European -- and even if it were true, it does not really mean that much because, except for a few decades after World War II, the European economy has always been bigger than the American. All over Europe some achievements of the welfare state have had to be cut back or abolished. The Eurobarometer is falling and falling.

However the real bones of contention are political rather than economic, and it is to these issues that William I. Hitchcock’s new history of Europe is devoted. Hitchcock belongs to a younger generation of historians. When he went to kindergarten, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle were no longer alive and even the students rebellion of 1968 was a thing of the past. In brief, the period of reconstruction in Europe had long ended; the Cold War was no longer in its acute phase; the struggle for Europe (the title of the present book) was really over; the borders were frozen and history had ceased to be turbulent (the subtitle of the book). By the time Hitchcock received his Yale degree, the Soviet empire had ceased to exist, and Gorbachev was out of power. (I could not agree more with him that history will deal with Gorbachev far more kindly than his fellow countrymen did; if ever a Nobel Peace Prize was due, it should have gone to him).

Thus, unlike many of his older colleagues, Hitchcock is not burdened (as Goethe said about America) by past disputes and irrelevant quarrels, be it on the origins of the Cold War or on missed opportunities (imaginary or real) to bring it to an end. Greater detachment alone does not make for good history, but in this case it is combined with wide reading, sure judgment on most vital issues and writing that is a pleasure. In an age of narrow specialization, Hitchcock would deserve congratulations for having tackled a topic of such magnitude even if he had failed, but he succeeded in what he set out to do.

He wisely leaves out cultural history, and while there are some pertinent statistics, there is little social history. An ideal history of Europe should combine all these aspects, but it cannot possibly be done by a single author and certainly not in one volume. Hitchcock writes with particular insight on Western and Central Europe and with competence about Eastern Europe. One would have liked to know a bit more about what high Stalinism was like and why the communist regimes collapsed. But this too would not have been possible within the compass of one volume and the unfortunate fact that Europe, unlike the United States, is not one country but consists of many that developed on different lines. The emphasis in this book is therefore all along on the major countries (and on the critical periods in their history -- for instance, Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Britain or the wars in the Balkans). This is the only way to write a history of Europe in our time; all writing of history is selective; the author had to pick and chose from an abundance of material from a multitude of countries, and his choice was almost always the right one. In brief, this is the book that should be read and studied by a generation of students of European history -- at least for a decade until new perspectives will make a reconsideration mandatory.

However, even very good books have their lapses of judgment. It is not clear (to mention a minor point) what made Hitchcock believe that the Falklands War was of tremendous importance for the career of Thatcher “transforming her from an embattled right wing ideologue to a national leader showing decisiveness and confidence.” Public opinion polls tell only part of the story, they change within a few weeks and are forgotten.

While the Falklands War gets three pages in a book in which space is at a premium, there are some surprising omissions. The Nazi wars of aggression happened before 1945, but how to understand postwar developments such as the deportation of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe without reference to Nazi crimes such as their Holocaust in Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Hitchcock recommends the works of Alfred-Maurice de Zayas as the best available guide to the postwar ethnic cleansing of Germans, which significantly changed the demographic map of Europe. But de Zayas is a controversial figure whose works were received with enthusiasm in certain circles in Germany but not among fellow historians. He marshals evidence (much of it perfectly correct) showing that millions of innocent people were expelled, many thousands perished in the process, women were raped. But this did not come as a bolt out of the blue; it was the last act in a war unleashed by Nazism.

Migration plays a central role in European affairs today, and I am not sure Hitchcock does full justice to the complexity of the issues when he expresses disdain about the immigration policy of all European governments, which is to keep out immigrants who are not victims of political or ethnic persecution. Of course, in an ideal world everyone should be free to move everywhere, but unlike the United States, the European countries, with their much higher density of population, have not been countries of immigration for a thousand years (and even the immigration policies of America, Canada and Australia have not been that liberal of late). Unemployment is high, and present-day arrivals, unlike immigrants in the past, show little willingness to make concessions to the culture and way of life of the host country. Hence the tensions even in such traditionally tolerant countries as Holland and Scandinavia.

The integration of recent immigrants will remain one of the main domestic issues in the years to come. But of more concern is the issue, hinted at near the end of Hitchcock’s splendid book, when he writes about the “frustrating habits of dashing the hopes of its many citizens who keep waiting for the new Europe to arrive.” It is the absence of a common foreign and defense policy and, consequently, Europe’s impotence in international affairs. That the preeminent position Europe had in the 19th century, when it was ruling the world, would not last is not a matter of surprise; empires do not last forever. But it is not unreasonable to ask what prevented Europe from taking a role in world affairs commensurate with its economic and demographic strength. Is it belated exhaustion after two world wars, fascism and communism? Is it the belief that the world has entered an age in which military strength no longer counts and that now, with the Cold War over, Europe can withdraw into something that was once called splendid isolation? Is it the fact that the European Union has been a marriage of convenience without much commitment involved, let alone passion?

Perhaps the desire of a majority of Europeans to get their act together is not as ardent as some have thought; perhaps it will take much longer for European unity to take shape. These are the main issues Europe faces. The keys for understanding, however, are in the past, and one could not want a clearer exposition and a better guide at the present time than “The Struggle for Europe.”