European ‘Identity’ — part 1
Europe — to refer to that complex collection of states, institutions and traditions with that single name, suggests unity. The reality of course, is that Europe is ever-changing.
For most of its history, Europe was ripped apart, the scene of unimaginable bloodshed, temporarily interrupted by periods peace. Only in the past decades has the continent experienced relative calm, remaining instrumental in world affairs, contracting and expanding, as both an exporter of creation but certainly also of destruction.
Some of the foundations of modern Europe were created by the era of democratic revolutions as the intellectual force of the Enlightenment challenged some of the foundations of absolutism. This force culminated in the great French Revolution, which swept away those foundations and destroyed what the revolutionaries themselves called the Ancien Regime. The transition from the pre-modernity of Absolutism to our modern era of the Social Contract was riddled with complexities.
Revolutionary fervour was followed by ruthless terror as the revolution gobbled up some of its own children. The old order wasn’t simply annihilated, but stumbled back, clinging to old certainties. The Congress of Vienna rolled back some of the most progressive achievements of revolutionary Europe. At the same time it sanctified others: the separation of church and state, limited forms of representative governments and progressive tax systems took shape under the partial restoration of aristocracies and inherited privilege.
The philosophes of the great French Revolution had evoked visions of universal principles of social, political and economic freedom.
Once the shackles of the church had been broken, the untapped potential of humanity could finally be unleashed. But the political freedom they envisioned soon turned into absolutism and terror. Freshly won social freedoms morphed into new forms of slavery, while economic liberty remained the privilege of the lucky few. Nineteenth century capitalism did indeed unleash some of the productive force that agricultural Europe had left untouched, but it also created social misery, competition and ruthless greed, which was quickly exported to the rest of the world as the ‘enlightened’ bastions of industrial Europe expanded and started constructing their colonial empires.
With the potential for creation came the inevitable capacity to destroy, aptly demonstrated by the hitherto unimaginable horrors of two World Wars and the Nazi Holocaust.
Religion had been replaced by the nation; life and death were no longer presided over by transcendental omnipotence, but by political power concentrated in national states and their institutions. Huge bureaucracies now decided the fates of millions, working behind the scenes of elected parliaments that came and went.
The awesome power of the nation demonstrated its mobilizing force as 60 million people were affected by an existential struggle between old feudal empires and new industrial giants. Europe’s ‘age of destruction’ had begun as the almost inevitable consequence of the formative experiences of the Industrial Revolution. Although brief respite was promised by American president Wilson’s universal principles of self-determination, once again, these principles rapidly transformed into justifications for colonialism as both Britain and France divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire and carved into existence the modern Middle-East. Nation-states became the vehicles of emancipation, narrowing its confines and ultimately shaping it in the image of and to the advantage of the exploiters. In any sense, although universal principles had now been explicitly laid down and formulated in international treaties, they nevertheless continued to serve vested interests in the name of something else.
What had changed? Had universalism not been evoked as the guiding principle of industrialization and the expansion of markets? Were these not to be for the benefit of all, salvaging Europe’s pits of poverty and civilizing the savages of the primitive peripheries? Would wealth not gradually spread or ‘trickle down’ and would it not be the role of politics to simply accommodate the drive to profits and wealth creation? National projects, conservative by nature, could quite easily be heralded in the name of progress, while essentially cementing the interests of the profit makers and capitalists, reason for Marx to famously refer to the national state as the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie.’
A new type of loyalty was demanded from the citizens of Europe and their colonial counterparts. The abstract notion of the nation acquired an almost magical legitimacy, rooted in secularism and actively encouraged by elites pushing for empire. Universal loyalty to the nation transcended more traditional loyalties like religion or ethnicity and was counterposed to that of class, in an attempt to undermine the Marxist notion of internationalism and the spectre of communism. This new sense of belonging was rigorously encouraged throughout the nineteenth century and then solidified by conquest against the perceived ‘other.’
The obvious contradictions of this juxtaposition were crudely demonstrated by Hitler’s Third Reich, an entity demanding absolute subordination to the ‘universal’ national identity, obliterating the individual as well as carefully defining both its inclusiveness and exclusivity. Aggressive racism now defined belonging within national borders, excluding the perceived alien elements within those borders and redefining them as threats. The humiliation of ‘Germanness’ (a social construct which was really only a couple of decades old) by the Versailles Treaty and the obvious contradictions within that framework had prompted a radical and extremely violent reconstruction of the national concept which could only be accomplished by aggressively defining its nemesis in international Judaism and communism. The destruction of the threat to that newly found ‘universal identity’ found its shockingly natural conclusion in the Holocaust, completing the evolution of national identity as an emancipatory development to an inevitable spiral of self-destruction. The dark side of progress had never been so tangible.
