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Into the future of a common past - Giuseppe Galasso

Annachiara Colombo, Beatrice Capelli, Clarissa Bonardi, Silvia Marchesi

I. Roots

The Convention on the Future of Europe started on 28 February 2002 and was completed the next
year on 10 July and it was based on the Laeken Declaration of 2001. As a result, the convention
produced a Treaty which established the Constitution for Europe, whose draft text was presented
the same year by the European Convention chairman Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. On 29 October
2004 the Treaty was signed by the 25 countries then members of the European Union (EU) and they
also asked for ratification procedures. This process ended in 2007 with referenda, when France and
the Netherlands rejected the call for ratification and abandoned the Treaty.
Anyway, this was a great first attempt to establish the EU Constitution, also because it was
dedicated to the ‘future of Europe’. The subject which was widely discussed was the one about the
ideal foundations and the historical and cultural values on which the European Constitution should
have been based. The text provided its aims in the first paragraph of the Preamble and it was
inspired by the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which have developed the
values of the rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.
The second article of Title I of Part I of the Constitution stated that the EU was founded on
the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect
for human rights, including minorities.
For sure these weren’t the best formulations on the subject, but at the time they needed all-
round mediation and consensus. Still, these same issues have caused many episodes of controversy
or drawn the most puzzling comments from European public opinion. Some of them were related to
the fact that the Catholic Church leaders wanted Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ to be part of the
founding principles of the Constitution for the EU.
In relation to the issues of European integration, Alcide De Gasperi made a speech and
stated that “at the origin of this European civilization Christianity is found'' and he pointed out that
he wanted to speak of the common European heritage. These are actually the reasons rolled out in
successive ecclesiastical and Catholic discourses on the question of European unity. The debate on
Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ was not included in the failed 2004 Constitution, but it has remained
alive in Catholic circles. As an example, Pope Francis talked about the matter and said that these
roots are grounded in ‘service’ and in the ‘gift of life’, and he also said that there are many roots.
The truth is that on a religious level Christianity is a revolution that influenced the course of history.
Christianity is original and unprecedented but also marked by a radical and inseparable unity.
Indeed, it has always had roots in human history and that’s why the claim to Europe’s ‘Christian
roots’ was quite understandable. From different points of view the issue is different, since from an
historical perspective Christianity comes from many roots, and then became the dominant force of
the age.
On the historiographical level, Christianity arises from tensions and from the cultural and
social strivings of the Greco-Roman empire. However, at the basis of Christianity we focus on the
world of the Old Testament, so Hellenism, Romanitas, Judaism are the three roots of Christianity.
Judaism is then Christianity’s primary root and the relationship with Hellenism is actually more
complex. In this regard, the mediation of Paul of Tarsus between Christian innovation and the
Hellenistic world is out of the question. However, the relationship between Christian patristics, both
Greek and Latin, and the Hellenic world is far more important. Platonism provided categories and
ideas to the thought and theology of Christianity to then organise the elements of the Revelation and
of the nascent Christian tradition.
Between the second and fifth centuries the Christian world went through a process related to
the moral and intellectual history of Christianity as a centuries-long primary element of the
Mediterranean and European world. And later it actually acquired and used doctrines and models
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derived from ancient philosophy. This fulfilled a historical need to strengthen the new wealth of
Christian ideas, which means that what had been constructed in the Hellenic world was an
‘everlasting purchase’.
The meeting between nascent Christian culture and tradition and Greek philosophy should
be then emphasised. In fact, the reasoning for this meeting should be defined as a distinguishing
element. Even in Greek thought there were truths to be sought, to be found, and which had to be
appropriated. They were truths produced by the ‘seminal’ logos and by the presences of the divine
in creation, which men can pick as “seeds of truth”. This had occurred with some Hellenic thinkers,
whose seeds could be picked to the benefit of the conceptual work.
The divergences of patristics between the second and the fifth centuries were many, also
because of the relationship between logos and Trinity. The topic about logos is an ancient one in the
Hellenic thought. Important to underline is that the idea of a sapiential tradition was consolidated
throughout the developments ranging from Stoicism, to Middle-Platonism, to Neo-Platonism, to
patristics. So, the roots of Christianity are complex and multifarious referring to Judaism, Hellenism
and Romanitas. Their multiplicity and complexity render simplistic the traditional notions,
according to which Christianity acquired its religious genealogy from Judaism, its methodology and
conceptualisation from Hellenism, and its legal and institutional sense from Romanitas. In these
derivations it is the whole pre-Christian body of Christianity that engages with the full gamut of the
Christian spirit and of Christian thought. So, the individual elements of Christianity must be
measured against an all-encompassing relational whole. In the end, no derivation or root, would
change the creative originality or the global otherness of Christianity, in the form it took between
the first and second century.
Christianity had such great originality and novelty that, already between the third and fourth
centuries Christianity had become the global and alternative to the past. In other words, it was
accounted as a driving force in a world which was fast changing.

II. Borders

In this way, the matter of the Christian roots of Europe is transformed into the question of
the roots of Christianity, which is considered as a historical process. As already said, Christianity
derives from Hellenism, Judaism and Romanitas, which leads one to believe that they are also the
primary roots of Europe. And this deduction has two advantages, because it doesn’t affect the
nature of Christianity’s originality and novelty and we can also trace European roots back to the
ancient Mediterranean.
In this sphere Europa/Europe was known both as a mythological name (the former) and a
geographical name (the latter). The mythological meaning refers to the daughter of Oceano and
Teti, who was abducted by Zeus in the form of a white bull. Some believe that the abduction
suggests that civilization is relocated from East to West. But the etymology and origin of the name
suggest a Phoenician root, since the word “ereb” described the lands to the west and so Europe
would have been the name given to the Western lands. However, some scholars also considered its
Greek origin even though it’s hard to say when it acquired its topographical meaning, but probably
the name initially described certain regions of Greece. So, some Ionian geographers ended up by
designating the lands north of the Mediterranean as Europe.
However, actual knowledge of the European continent was inaccurate. To the west the
European border was identified with the Pillars of Hercules, while to the east it was the river Phasis
or the Cimmerian Bosporus. Moreover, both borders didn’t change for a very long time, so even the
southern border was mapped out from east to west. Beyond the Mediterranean, the outline of the
British Isles was known sketchily; as an example, Scania, that is the southern tip of Scandinavia,
was thought to be an island and only later it became clear that Scandinavia is a peninsula bordering
on the Barents Sea and Baltic Seas. In the sixteenth century, other navigators kept on exploring the
White Sea and the outer reaches of the British Isles and Iceland became well-known just in the
eighth century.
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 By the sixteenth century the western and northern contours of the continent had been
mapped out. In regard to the land borders, the boundaries were marked by ancient geographers and
only in the eighteenth century the lands up to the Urals were fully geographically incorporated and
just a century later, the Urals became known as the cut-off line between Asia and Europe.
Also because of the difficulty in mapping out its eastern borders, Europe looked like a
peninsular appendix of the surface of Asia. In 1858 Carl Gustav Reuschle introduced the term
Eurasia to point out the unity of the two continents. However, we don’t have to give up the idea of
Europe as an entity in its own right: for instance it has a central position in the northern hemisphere
and it also borders the Atlantic. But it’s not only about its position: in fact, Europe doesn’t have
striking climatic contrasts, there are no rain forests or deserts and there are other elements which
allow us to define the European area as autonomous.
Remarkable is for example Europe’s broad linguistic unity, since even in the past all
populations spoke Indo-European languages. There are only some modest exceptions, such as the
Lappish and Basque tongues. Another remarkable fact is that this continent is characterised by
islands, peninsulas and headlands and also by a coastal articulation.
Because of these reasons, European geography often promoted forms of political pluralism,
and pushed for watchful self-rule and relations among european people. Being more specific, we
can say that Europe may be considered as an ‘anthropogeographic continent’, as opposed to the
traditional concept of continent in a spatial sense.

III. Times

A comprehensive knowledge of the European geography was not fully achieved until the
late modern age, that is, not before the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. Besides, a point that has
never ceased to be the subject of debate was the question of the historical chronology, not on a
geographical level, but from the point of view of the physical space, marked out as Europe. In such
terms, the question becomes a great deal simpler, if we are able to identify the time in which it is
possible to distinguish more clearly than ever before that historical area that can be reasonably
defined as European; and that time is the fall of Roman empire in the West. For the first time in
history, with the Roman Empire, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea were politically
united under Roman sovereignty, from the borders of Mesopotamia to the Rhineland, from
Morocco to Romania. It was a political entity so aware of its Mediterranean character that the heart
of its territories, the sea, was called Mare internum, or Mare nostrum.
From the Continent’s point of view, the boundaries along the Rhine and Danube had been
violated to the point of vanishing, leading to a lasting association and gradual integration between
the lands on this side of the imperial Roman limes and those beyond it. Rome itself was exiled from
its chief role of capital of the empire by the ‘new Rome’, commissioned by Constantine the Great,
who gave it his name Constantinople. So, the Imperial unity, still effective in the last years of
Theodosius I, between 392 and 395, ended with him. The empire definitively split into two parts,
Eastern and Western, although its unity continued to be professed in law.
In the western part, between the fifth and sixth century, a series of kingdoms had been
founded by the Germanic people invading the empire from East and West; in the eastern part the
empire continued to exist for many centuries as a Roman empire, with the name of Byzantine (that
comes from Byzantium, the city where Constantine established the new Rome). The loss of the
empire’s western half, along with the Germanic conquest of Britain of the lands from the Rhine to
the Alps and the Pyrenees, of the Iberian Peninsula and of Italy, definitely mark a profound
historical break. This break is significant enough to say that it marks the point in time in which the
actual history of Europe, as we have always understood it, starts.
Many historians have believed there to be a certain continuity between the world before and
the one after the Germanic invasions and conquests. Already from the end of the fourth century and
up to its peak in the seventh century, the material and cultural heritage of the Roman world was
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falling to ruin and being lost with increasing scope and intensity. The former Roman world of the
seventh century had become dramatically impoverished: this was evident in the alarming drop in
population; in cities being reduced to small; in civil infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts, etc)
being in a state of disrepair or heavily damaged, along with all form of communication; in the loss
or destruction of the monumental, artistic and cultural heritage in the almost complete
disappearance of the Greek tongue from the former Western Roman lands; in the consequent
corruption of the proper way of writing and speaking Latin. So, post-Roman European history, also
called ‘the dark ages’, was until the fourteenth century.
There was still no talk, and this for a long time, of Europe and of Europeans. The dominant
term used in ancient times for expressing awareness had been the Roman concept of empire; and
this cultural reference point remained firmly set on the European horizon, as an ideal and as an idea
of perfect civilised living. In post- Roman Europe the dominant standard of reference became
religious, in accordance with the change of values brought about by Christianity. So, there was the
shift from empire to Roman empire, as it was known from the first half of the eleventh century, and
then to Holy empire, which took hold in the mid-twelfth century, as was the case of the Holy
Roman empire in the mid-thirteenth, to indicate the ‘empire’ established under Charlemagne in the
year 800.
The association between Christianity and the Church of Rome had followed a somewhat
parallel route, so that the connection between Christianity and Europe also required that the Church
of Rome would become identified with Europe; and this idea of Europe repre- senting the Roman
Church and, consequently, its pope also took off very quickly. From the Roman perspective, this
Church corresponded geographically to Europe lying west of the Baltic-Adriatic axis.
The Christianity associated with Europe was, therefore, Christian-Catholic and pertained to
the Church of Rome. In 1458 pope Pius II proclaimed that he would speak of the events that
occurred apud Europaeos aut qui cristiano nomine censentur (‘among Europeans or those who
would go by the name of Christians’). Henceforth, the notion of Europe becomes settled (until
roughly the eighteenth century) in its close ties and association with the notion of Christianity, but
also, increasingly, as a completely autonomous entity in its own right.
Is this to say that in the ‘dark ages’ and up to the thirteenth or fourteenth century there has
been no talk of Europe? Clearly, the answer is no. For example, in a geographical sense, the word is
found several times in Dante’s works and in several works of a lot of authors of that time.

IV. Events

European secularization and expansion didn’t need that Christianity and the Christian spirit
in Europe had been abandoned. These continued to enrich Europe and Europeans with all the
stimuli and contributions of their history. These values were now the sine qua non of being
European. Since early post-Roman times, being European had also carried a political theme that
would always monopolize the political and ethical-political history of the emerging ‘European
Europe’. There was a dual-conflict theme. On the one hand, the unavoidable conflict between
gaining a unity like the one achieved by Rome in the Mediterranean world and maintaining it. On
the other hand, within the framework of this multiplicity, an equally hopeless conflict existed
between the hegemony exercised by one or more players.
The first alternative sustained the imperial notion of Rome occupied one of the most
conspicuous chapters in the history of Europe with its legacy and traditions. Unity meant order and
peace, and, as peace, it immediately became a firm point of reference also on the part of Christians
and on the Church. Variety was not in opposition to Unity. Variety opposed unity in the form of the
autonomist aspirations that gained ground in the former Roman provinces among local populations,
were now in a position to obtain a certain degree of autonomous self-determination. And, once
multiplicity was assumed, the facts would determine the outcome of the alternative between
equilibrium and hegemony. For this reason, the conflict among Franks, Visigoths and Ostrogoths at
the beginning of the sixth century can surely be viewed as ‘the first European war’. The Visigoths
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occupied the Iberian Peninsula and parts of France up to the river Loire. The Frankish king Clovis,
assisted by the Burgundians, attacked them to extend his kingdom to the South. At Vouillé, in 507,
he defeated the Visigoths and pushed them back across the Pyrenees. At that point Clovis and his
Burgundian partners were set upon by Theodoric, Ostrogoth king of Italy, who defeated them at
Arles in 509. Theodoric acquired the Provençal coast up to the Rhone, while the Visigoths
successfully retook the coastal region from the Rhone to the Pyrenees. The much-feared Frankish
hegemony was blocked. The hegemonic design would then be completed by the Franks under
Charlemagne. But, meanwhile, other events had developed in the European framework: first of all,
the Church of Rome establishing itself as an independent power in the political and civil spheres.
The seventh century saw another key player of future world history appear on the Euro-
Mediterranean scene: Islam. For Europe of those times it constituted a decisive element concerning
defining the continent geographically and creating its identity. Islam immediately became the other
against which the Christian world measured itself prejudicially. In the West, the Arabs had invaded
the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and quickly extended their rule to the Pyrenees, except for the
northwest corner (Asturias, Cantabria and Galicia). Then they crossed the Pyrenees and drove in the
heart of France until Charles Martel. In the central Mediterranean, Arab expansion in the ninth
century had led to the conquest of Sicily and to temporary occupation in other Italian islands, in
southern Italy and up to Liguria and Provence. But between 1061 and 1091 Sicily was
reconquested. The Christian reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula ended in 1212 with the victory of
the kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre at Las Navas de Tolosa, in Andalusia.
Meanwhile, other impressive events were leaving their mark on Europe: Charlemagne with
the rise of Frankish hegemony and the return of the concept of empire. Charlemagne conquered the
kingdom of the Lombards in Italy, subdued Germany from the Rhine to the Elbe and converted the
Saxons to Christianity, crossed the Pyrenees and established various fortified towns on their
foothills, in Navarre and Catalonia. His dominions now stretched from the rivers Tiber to the Elbe
and to the Ebro. No such thing had been seen in the West since the fall of Rome.
Even less bound up with the imperial promotion of Charlemagne was the Muslim Arabs’
outpouring onto the Mediterranean scene. That irruption would cause Roman-Germanic Europe to
be separated from its traditional Roman-Mediterranean reference points in both political and
economic terms, and so there would be an objective correlation between the expansion of Islam and
a general socio-economic setback in Europe, which allowed the Franks to successfully assert their
power. In truth, Charlemagne’s empire was built in the wake of the aforementioned struggle for
hegemony among the Roman-Germanic kingdoms, which had begun long before the prophet
Mohammad and Islam erupted so vehemently onto the scene of this story.
The most important event of nascent Europe, occurring at the beginning of the second
Christian millennium, surely deserves to be identified with the founding of European economy,
whose major centres were to be found in Italy. Behind this phenomenon there was a demographic
explosion that almost doubled European population in three centuries. More manpower meant that
agriculture was developed more intensely, increasing the production, also because, once again, the
land was widely settled everywhere. Agriculture could therefore be the driver behind European
progress, whose other fundamental and decisive pole was represented by the cities, which
reappeared once again flourishing. Short and long-distance trade routes were funded, and commerce
attested to be the real driving force behind the great European rise. It was also bringing a major
growth in manufacturing. This allowed to establish a well-functioning mechanism that ensured a
gigantic ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital, techniques, networks of relations, equipment,
practices, means and systems of communication, upon which all later developments of the
European economy were founded. A large marketplace also took shape at the time, which tied
together the various commercial sectors in Europe’s post-Roman age and extended them.
Difficult questions were raised concerning relations between ethics, religion and economics,
even on a largely theoretical scale. That ancient prejudice against mercantile activities was
beginning to dissolve. These limitations were all quickly tempered, modified, or overcome. The
changes were signaled by the return of gold coinage in the West in the mid-thirteenth century.
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 European development from the year 1000 onward truly represented an event of global
proportions, both from the cultural point of view and from the social point of view, which lay the
defining basis for future European fortunes, also witnessing crises moments. In fact, already the
fourteenth century witnessed a general crisis – epidemic, demographic, economic, social – of
devastating gravity. Indeed, the very extent and depth of the crisis testified to the robustness of the
European framework built in the previous three or four centuries. Not for nothing, the 14th century
crisis came to a close with the beginning of one of the most original and relevant ages in European
spiritual life, culture and art.

V. Modernity

It was the age of Humanism and the Renaissance. In that period, a great innovation had taken
place in the military field that had proved to be decisive in historical developments. Indeed, the use
of firearms had radically altered the notion and practice of war.
Starting from the thirteenth century was introduced the use of gunpowder and in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries were introduced the new weapons (cannons, muskets, siege mortars,
harquebuses) that had increasingly gained the upper hand.
Another important invention was that of movable type printing. This Chinese new technique
garnered overwhelming success in Europe, where it was developed by Johannes Gensfleisch
Gutenberg, who published his famous Bible in 1455. The printing process was the first true, great
medium of mass communication in history, and this would impact in particular the circulation of
ideas and the conditions of cultural life, as already seen with the advancements brought about by
Humanism and the Renaissance.

(Further information about the movable type printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=1kOmdSIpCm4).

Humanism and Renaissance had their beginning and their highest expressions in Italy. It was
the Humanists who coined the phrases media tempestas/media aetas, meaning the time elapsed
since the fall of the Roman empire in the West until their time; and they attributed strongly negative
connotations to this ‘middle age’: for its Latin so far removed from the classical language; for its
culture locked in complicated doctrinal schemes and in heavy-going analytical discussions; for its
architecture and its art so distant from classical canons.
The perfection found in the measures of classicism was such because it was thought to derive
from nature and its imitation; and on this basis imitating the ancients and reverting to classicism
were seen as a sure-fire way of conquering and affirming one’s own new identity. In Humanism, all
this basically gravitated around the domain of artes liberales, humanae litterae: therefore, literature,
art, historiography, philosophy. As such, Humanism was at the heart of the Renaissance. At the
heart, that is, of that cluster of elements that between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (first in
Italy, then elsewhere) betokened a new ‘historical spring’; a time that is safely assumed to mark the
beginning of the modern age for Europe.Even Humanism and the Renaissance, as well as the actual
Middle Ages, did not constitute a monolithic historical bloc; they were multifaceted worlds with a
great deal of ramifications within them, both sectoral and geographical and chronological, akin to a
borderland with highly irregular boundaries enclosed between the age that at that time was declared
closed and a future in the making where everything was yet to be defined. There was also the far
from systematic heritage made up of ideas and attitudes that constituted its great historical legacy: a
new intuition of man inspired by a heroic ideal shaped upon classic cardinal virtues, a juxtaposition
between a superior ethical wisdom and natural science, especially medicine, in its outward
perspective as opposed to the true essence of man.
On the morning of 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus sighted the coastline and the
island of the Bahamas archipelago. He then landed in Cuba and Haiti before returning to Spain. We
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know that he intended to discover a western route to the Indies. Only in 1507 the German
geographer Martin Waldseemüller gave this new world the name of another Italian navigator,
Amerigo Vespucci.
There are ridiculous allegations about Columbus, for example that he used secret maps and
also an unknown navigator who was already experienced in the crossing. For the first time in
history, an exploration was organised on the basis of a scientific hypothesis, rather than with the
logic of proceeding ‘step by step’ or looking ‘further afield’ or ‘around the corner’. Indeed, the
theory rested upon the basis of the supposed roundness or sphericity of the Earth.
Instead, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama arrived in the Indies by heading eastwards and using
the traditional method of celestial navigation and landing in Calcutta in 1498. Another Portuguese
seaman, Ferdinand Magellan, sailing under the Spanish flag, left Spain in September 1519 to look
for a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the southern shores of the New world. He found
this in the Strait that bears his name in November 1520 and was able to continue his journey into
the Pacific, landing in the Philippines in March 1521. This was the first circumnavigation of the
world.
Geographical discoveries triggered the globalisation of world economic life, reaching its peak
between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, and extending and intensifying global trade
and commerce between various parts of the world.
Economic globalisation has also been accompanied, at an ever-increasing pace since the
twentieth century, by a broader Europeanisation of the ways of life, habits and much of civil life in
non-European countries. European science and technologies were received even more widely, also
in those countries that had shown greater reluctance in accepting the European way of thinking and
European values.
A great new rift had appeared in Western European Christendom, after the split of 1054
between Catholics and Orthodox. Beginning in 1517 with a famous initiative by Martin Luther
seeking Christian religious reform, the Protestant movement.The Church did not remain inactive
before the challenges presented by Protestant success and fielded a response that demonstrated all
its vitality and the wealth of deeply ethical and religious forces. The corrupt, worldly Church which
had been lambasted by the Reformation, became a very active Church, displaying strength and self-
confidence in claiming its predominant religious role in the lives of worshipers and in all aspects of
social life. The repressive violence of the Holy Office, the censorial control over life in general and
over intellectual activities with the Index of forbidden books, along with the restoration and
expansion of the pontifical and hierarchical discipline of the clergy and the Christian people
amounted to the entire significance of the Counter-Reformation, which would therefore be devoid
of any added value. Some Catholic historians have replaced the definition of Counter-Reformation
with that of Catholic Reformation, by way of marking the Catholic Church’s comeback from the
Council of Trent (1545–63) onward: A Council whose profound and overall reorganization of
Catholic doctrine and discipline lasted four centuries before being revised and variously modified.
Religion was allowed to qualify once again among the justifications for ever-frequent wars among
the European powers, although, from this perspective, its importance was steadily ebbing, also on
account of the continuous developments in all fields of European thought, from political and social
doctrines to different philosophical, historical and anthropological disciplines, and to scientific and
technical knowledge. The ‘lights of reason’ would shine into every nook and cranny of human and
natural reality. This paved the way to yet another European cultural revolution of extraordinary
importance, the Enlightenment, whose horizon began to cloud over only at the end of the eighteenth
century with the appearance of gradually more menacing signs.

VI. Heartland

The modern age had struck a positively impressive balance from almost every point of view.
Europe had been at that point and for some time already in an undisputed leading position in the
world.
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 In the following nineteenth century, and with the industrial revolution, this primacy had
expanded and consolidated itself in such a way as to warrant talk of Europe as the Heartland. At a
global level, Mackinder’s Heartland was the vast Eurasian expanse stretching from the Volga to the
Yangtze in China from east to west and from the Himalayas to the Arctic Ocean from south to
north. In practice, this geographical position ensured that China or, above all, Russia would achieve
world domination.
In the world that they had been gradually discovering in the wake of Columbus, Europeans
had steadily established their supremacy to such an extent that even up to World War II more than
half of the Earth’s surface was in thrall to European countries as colonies, or (as in Russia) had even
been incorporated to become an integral part of their national territory.
The Europe that had achieved world domination was, in fact, what we called European
Europe, enclosed between the Atlantic and the Baltic-Adriatic line, which came to include Russia in
the eighteenth century. It was a Europe that, while busy conquering the world, at the same time had
been fighting on its soil an endless series of wars driven by that alternative between hegemony and
balance.
The modern cycle of this dynamic began at the end of the fifteenth century with the so-called
Italian wars and continued with varying intensity, but always with high frequency between the
sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, with Spanish dominance until the mid-seventeenth century,
followed by French supremacy, and finally, in an effort to strike a balance, yielding under the thrust
and stewardship of Britain.
In that period, emerged the idea of man as a person remained in the foreground, especially
with regard to life in the community (the respect for his individuality, the attainment of his full
potential, the framework of his social and natural rights, his freedom of self-expression and self-
fulfilment in the most diverse forms and on the most diverse levels, his participation in public life in
a manner befitting his nature as a rational and moral being, …).

VII. Société des esprits

The reason why the Revolution was able to endorse such profound significance, is because
ever since its ‘dark ages’ Europe had continued in its cultural unity, as well as in a general
political-social parallelism, also in front of the relevant differences that have always marked the
conditions and the civil life in its countries.

During the centuries of the ancien régime the European unity- diversity had actually become
worse. Voltaire expressed this in the Siècle de Louis XIV (1751):
“Christian Europe, all except Russia, might for a long time have been
considered as a sort of great Republic, divided into several States, some monarchical,
and others mixt. Of the latter, some were aristocratical, and others popular; but all
connected with one another; all professing the same system of religion, tho’ divided
into several sects; all acknowledging the same principles of public justice and
policies, unknown to the other nations of the world (The age of Louis XIV, edited by
R Griffith, 1st vol (London 1779) 7).”

The expression for a long time referred to the period of the Renaissance, when Europed had reached
a complete maturity. This was two or three Centuries before Voltaire was born, before Russia
joined the commonwealth of European nations and before Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that:

“The powers of Europe constitute a kind of system, united by the same

religion, international law and moral standards, [...] by commerce and by a kind of
equilibrium which is the inevitable outcome of all these ties [...]”.

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All the above applied not only to sovereigns and States, but to Europeans as well. As we can see,
both in Voltaire and in Rousseau, the element of the community of culture was one of the
strongest bonds keeping Europe together. Voltaire spoke with the utmost conviction of ‘‘a
Republic of Letters was insensibly established in Europe, in the midst of war, and notwithstanding
the number of different religions’’ indeed since the days of Humanism there had been talk of a
respublica literaria. The idea that this république was a sort of political alternative to the
absolutism of the powers that be does not seem to be the truth. In fact, it was the spontaneous by-
product of the width and intensity of cultural activity that was increasingly establishing itself in
modern Europe, as it was facilitated by the spread of the printing press, and by the progressive
increase and strengthening of the social class at the forefront of cultural life, along with the
exchanges of ideas and intellectual relations.

Voltaire perceived this emerging ‘republic of letters’ as a fundamental argument not only for a
unified European identity, but also for an internal unity among various European countries:

“Italy and Russia were united by the bonds of science, and the natives of England,
Germany, and France went to study at Leyden’; and ‘the Arts and Sciences all of them
thus received mutual assistance from each other’. The academies had ‘helped to form
this republic’; and ‘the truly learned, of every denomination, have strengthened the
bands of this grand Society of Geniuses (société des esprits), universally extended, and
every where independent’’

Rousseau then wrote that Europe is not merely a ‘collection of peoples’ but ‘a real society
which has its morals, its religion, its customs and even its laws, which none of the peoples who
compose it can set aside without soon causing disturbances’.

VIII: The West

By the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, Europe was no longer that ‘European Europe’ which
we have discussed above, not only because now Russia had fully become part of it, but above all
because European emigration and settlement in the rest of the world had created new ‘Europes’
elsewhere (Mexico and the rest of Central and South America, then North America, and finally in
Australia and New Zealand throughout the nineteenth century). These colonies were at first
depending from the European countries but then they gradually claimed, and finally obtained, full
independence.
The first colonies that started to become independent were the British ones, which founded
the United States of America (after a war which lasted from 1776 to 1783). In Latin America the
independence movements actually took off in 1809; while the road to independence for Canada,
New Zealand and Australia was more complex. The many new Europes, that had gradually sprung
up all over the world, eventually were linked to the old Europe and this combination became
labeled ‘the West’.
The notion of the West as opposed to the East was an ancient one in the European world
going back to the Persian wars of ancient Greece and then to the Roman civil war between Octavian
and Marc Anthony. On such occasions, the West was portrayed as the positive pole of human
history. It was the world of freedom and dignity of men, first and foremost, in contrast with the
Eastern world, seen as a byword for despotism, tyranny, lack of freedom and civil dignity. The
West was civilized while the East was barbarous.
During the mid-nineteenth century, Carlo Cattaneo perfectly explained in a passage for which
reasons is worthy of being regarded as a classic. He says:

“When we name a place as barbaric we are not saying that there are no sumptuous
cities, no agriculture or no commerce there [...]. But, just like the free Greeks and
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 Romans standing before the Persians and the Syrians, we sense in the midst of all this an
aura of barbarism [...] because those cities have no municipal order, no law, no dignity;
they are inanimate, inorganic beings, incapable of exercising any act bred by reason or
free will upon themselves, having yielded to the decrees of fatalism, which is not born
out of religion, but of politics [...]”.

In this passage Cattaneo revisits the original political significance of the Hellenic antithesis
between West and East, based on the juxtaposition between freedom (for the former) and serfdom
(for the latter). It would be inaccurate to claim that the relevance of the Europe-Heartland imperial
consciousness was simply reflected in its entirety in the passage by Cattaneo. By now, it amounted
to the whole consciousness of the West, consisting of European and extra-European Europe
alike.
Not surprisingly, even before the French Revolution, one of the new Europes that had thrived
elsewhere in the world would send a clear message, through the American Revolution that was
hatching between the 1760s and 1770s, concerning the inadequacy of a tradition that bounded the
history and sense of European civilisation with an exclusively geographical idea of Europe.
However, the American message had a European origin for what regarded the values and the ideals
it proclaimed in the Constitution (1787) awarded to the new State. Its system was based on the
absence of nobility or class hierarchies; on the substantial equality of rights of citizens as men (by
right of natural law and not by privilege or grace granted by others); on popular sovereignty only;
on full political and religious freedom; on a strong tendency towards self-government; on the
separation between State and Church; on the separation of executive, legislative and judicial
powers. In other words, these were the essence of the theories that European political thought had
elaborated on the subject during the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries.
Even though the French Revolution (1798) gave this political principales more powerful trust
and greater range, it failed to bring about a significant regime change and a lasting constitution as in
the United States.
The first French Constitution of 1792 overhauled so deeply France’s social-political order,
institutions and legislation that it gained extraordinary political-cultural and idealistic prestige,
modelling itself as a driving force later in history and the world over.
The French Revolution produced decisive experiences affecting European thought and
history. This revolutionary situation would give rise to the three major issues that would hang over
the history of Europe: the issue of freedom and democracy, the social issue, the national issue. The
above questions would also spawn the main trends of European political thought over the following
two centuries; the different types of political and social forces at the forefront of the new historical
scene; the developments underlying the various historical phases of these two centuries and their
completeness, even if not consistent.

IX. Autumn

After the 25 years of great unrest and complexities arising from the French Revolution and the
resulting Napoleonic regime, since 1815 a time of relative stability followed, ending with the series
of European revolutions of 1848–49. After this, already in the second half of the nineteenth century
the first symptoms of the dramatic events of the twentieth century had begun to appear: a century
(mislabelled as the short 20th century) that first saw European world dominance reach its peak, only
to then rapidly dissolve within a few decades, from the mid-twentieth century onward, when even
its predominance in cultural life and technical-scientific innovation, as well as its military,
economic and financial primacy, had shifted across the Atlantic to the United States.
Meanwhile, material progress in Europe had been surprisingly strong, with a considerable rise
in living conditions and standards at mass level. However, political stability did not reach much
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progress, and it was only after World War II, and the later fall of communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, that the situation of Europe appeared to reach some form of stability.
The founding of the EU was rightly portrayed as a decisive strengthening factor to this
stabilisation, also because it ultimately brought about, in practice, a bipartite separation of the
European space, between the EU area and that of Russia, which had returned to its great national
entity after the long season of Soviet communism. However, EU was not able to find a dimension of
peace and tranquillity.
In the years of Europe’s greatest achievements, Tocqueville predicted “that the dominant
position of the European nations in world affairs would come to an end in a not too distant future”.
T. together with other thinkers had begun to raise doubts and fears about the consequences of such a
rapid growth of industrial society, and how this would affect ethical-political life and freedom. In
Italy a most relevant trace of this is found in the writings of Benedetto Croce (in his Storia
d’Europa nel secolo decimonono). B.C. defined activism as a general, and not merely literary
tendency to ‘do for the sake of doing’.
Liberalism and democracy were then challenged and denied as much by the nationalistic as by
the socialist and communist ideologies, which largely held the stage in the Europe of the first half of
the twentieth century, and proved themselves crucial in carrying that disproof into totalitarian
political regimes.

X. Post fata

In the aftermath of World War II, the European spirit was forced to face a series of relentless
challenges that have been arduous and displaying an unprecedented material and moral consistency.
Material growth, economic well-being, and an easier access to wealth were factors that raised once
again the old question about the antinomy of being and having, for which a possible balance, both
practical and ethical, was searched. The problem had arisen in a Europe that was largely secularised
and laicised, where the attempts to create a sort of well-being faded, as they failed to provide
satisfying answers to man’s problems.
It raised a new question, a problem which had arisen in a Europe at odds with its past and
struggling with a whole new kind of relations with the rest of the world. The issues in Europe were
proved by the civil unrest of the late 1960s and beyond: the whole movement consisted of young
people, and the prospect was that of a generational rift that so far has not appeared to have healed.
In parallel, Europe was ‘in the dock’, and the trial was led by European culture and public
opinion and conducted with increasing intensity during the second half of the 20th Century. Its goal
was to re-examine Europe’s past in such a way that was absolutely regrettable for Europe.
Despite all the above, if we look at the values and ideas progressively wrought by European
culture and the European spirit, they appear not to have yielded under the imperial decline of
Europe, they have also demonstrated their state of good health and that the fact that they continue to
thrive as a living and vital heritage, as current and active as ever before in the new world geography
that has taken shape from the mid-twentieth century onward.
The proud certainties of yesteryear have thus yielded to an implacable restlessness even below
the surface of a geographical area that remains among the world’s richest and most advanced, and
that, through the EU, believes to have rightly found a viable route for a more significant presence,
renewed in status and influence.
A Catholic scholar of Humanism closely associated with the controversial thesis of a
perennial Humanism insisted on positing the historical reality of a tradition of wisdom or logos
bearing superior ethical and human values, as belonging to European and Christian civilisation and
its historical significance.
In short, something far deeper and more meaningful dwells in Europe’s present than the
dwindling twilight of an imperial past alongside unparalleled cultural and scientific achievements.
And perhaps the manner in which Europe will choose to identify and explain this to itself and to the
rest of the world is what shall provide present-day Europe with a raison d’être and a chance to
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make history that is not unworthy of its past, though measurable on other value scales and orders of
magnitude. This is not to say that Europe must be forced out of itself. One may truly say that,
embedded in its own history, Europe: “carries the seeds and principles of its own new history, and
reviewing all that can and must be reviewed, but without departing from the vocations most
congenial to it without, for the sake of living, losing what makes life worth living because that
indeed would spell out the end, the true finis Europae”.

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