The European legacy: light and shadows

The European legacy: light and shadows

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Choosing to reflect upon the soul of Europe undoubtedly opens on a daunting task which many prominent thinkers have taken up. Some linked it to its Christian roots. Decades after Robert Schuman, Jacques Delors, also a dedicated catholic, who fathered the single market, argued that neither market nor institutions were sufficient, and that the European project needed a soul, consisting in a cultural, spiritual and ethical component. Others, like the keen observer George Steiner also discerned that soul, beyond the metaphysical quest for meaning, in socializing through café culture, in literature, music and multilingualism. There have also been proposals to anchor it into the past, such as explicitly mentioning the Christian roots in the draft constitution, some two decades ago. And in 2016, when the Charlemagne Prize was awarded to Pope Francis, Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission, reminded the audience that the soul of Europe is in its values, the dignity of the human being in the first place.

Another dimension is the articulation with European civilization, which is a different, yet connected concept. The French writer Mirabeau coined the word “civilization” in the middle of the 18th century, during the French Enlightenment, as a substantive for either the process or the final stage of accession to the level of “civility” in use among aristocrats at the court of Versailles. But he provided at the same time a critical assessment of it – which happens to be a significant feature of that civilization. The way had been paved already by previous thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu with his “Persian letters”, in which he borrowed the eyes of foreigners from the East to look with irony at the customs and behaviors of Europeans. And after many others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also contrasted the "Noble Savage", in a state of nature, with the corruption and the oppression the state and society were imposing upon man in European societies.

This was of course fed by the growing awareness, thanks to travels and exploration, of “otherness” and by the interest in orientalism, pointing towards other, non-European, forms of civilization, challenging the claim of European civilization to have reached the most developed stage of culture, the arts and manners. Still, European civilization was epitomized in the 19th century, which was also an era of romanticism. Before the House of Peers, in 1846, at a time when Poland had been wiped out from the political map of Europe, the French novelist and poet Victor Hugo claimed that France and Poland were "two sisters who have fought together for European civilization (...) the French people who have been its missionary, the Polish people who have been its knight"[1]. Civilization and soul mean different things to different people and whatever take one chooses to address that issue, it is difficult to avoid an element of subjectivity.

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Whether civilization or soul, the legacy of Christianity is hardly avoidable, to the point that the word Europe was absent for centuries from the lexicon, as Europe was entirely christianized by the end of the 14th century. German writer Goethe considered Christianity to be the “mother language of Europe”. And French author Chateaubriand noted that all universities were founded by Christian sovereigns or bishops. The same can be said of the arts and culture, with a huge heritage ranging from cathedrals to paintings. Many of those have been included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage of mankind and judging by the emotion caused by the fire of Notre-Dame in 2019, the image of that Cathedral is still extremely strong.

But defining Europe by its sole Christian roots, as some suggest, does not account for all of Europe’s features. Those also draw on previous contributions from Greece – democracy, representative government, not to mention science – Rome – Roman law, institutions of a republic, citizenship – as well as Judaism – monotheism, human dignity, the sanctity of life and the linear nature of History. Arab civilization also contributed to the fields of science and philosophy.

War, a European addiction

That legacy is far from being one-sided, though, as some would like to depict it. While warfare is certainly a currency of mankind, irrelevant of culture or religion, the consolidation of Catholicism under the Holy Roman Emperor, first Charlemagne and then Otto I, rested on a string of wars. While legitimizing conversion of Pagans with fire and sword – the Saxon, Slavic and Hungarian Wars, before the Northern crusades – uniting catholic rulers under the imperial crown failed to prevent war between them. Whether crowned by the Pope or by archbishops, catholic kings claimed a divine right to rule – and conquer. More often than not, the conquered was the neighbor. Those feuds led American sociologist Charles Tilly to conclude, after studying 11 centuries of European history (900-1990), that “War made the state, and the state made war”.

The ensuing exactions and atrocities prompted some theologians and scholars to hammer out rules to make wars more compliant with the teaching of the scriptures, whether the sixth commandment – “Thou shalt not kill” – or one core teaching of Christianity, about peace. Dwelling on the teachings of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas about “just wars” and the conditions to qualify, Spanish dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria outlined a universal law ruling the rights of people (jus gentium) and the conduct of war (jus in bello and jus ad bellum). Later secularized by Dutch humanist Grotius, those thoughts laid the foundations of international law. A French theologian, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, later outlined a "Project for Perpetual Peace" aimed at federating eighteen Christian monarchies under a constitution in Europe into a permanent Union, governed by a congress. Needless to say, those considerations were ignored in the real world, where wars were waged at leisure, many of which could not qualify as defensive or “just”, often with the blessing of national episcopates or even Popes. “Gott mit uns” was for centuries engraved on the clasp of the belts of Prussian soldiers. The alliance of the cross and the sword was most stringent during World War I, when most powers at war were Christian nations, in which national churches supported without reservation the domestic “sacred union”.

All in all, one singularity of the European continent is to have been, during the elapsed millennium, the most war-torn region of the world, in terms of frequency and even more regarding the huge number of victims, given the constant and fast improvement of weapon technology, which is also a feature of Europe’s technological advance.

Humanism, powerless in the face of evil

Another mixed legacy pertains to the relationship to the individual. Rooted in Greek philosophy – Plato – and judaic tradition, epitomized by Paul the Apostle, the postulate of the unity and universality of mankind is core to the christian faith. It has nurtured the theories of natural law and natural rights that came up at the dawn of Renaissance, stating that all human beings possess, by virtue of their rational nature, some inherent rights. The right to dignity has thus become a foundation of humanism, and a consequence of what French philosopher Michel de Montaigne calls the “human condition”.

Those postulates are hard to reconcile with the practices first witnessed in the process of evangelization of Europe, at the hands of the Teutonic order and the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, to convert Pagan tribes around the Baltic Sea. Similar practices were later introduced into the New World by conquistadores, followed by missionaries, ushering in the advent of colonialism. By granting catholic monarchs the right to establish settlements, papal bulls turned christianization into one of the rationales for colonization of the Americas. That endeavor consisted in military campaigns to destroy indigenous polities – some of them empires – in an unequal confrontation thanks to superior weaponry. It ended up in warfare, massacres, violence and destruction of what could also be called civilizations, followed by, more often than not, forced conversions. But it also consisted in rewarding the conquistadores with a forced labor system in mines and plantations. And when such a regime, which also included imported diseases, ended up decimating the ranks of the natives, it was followed by the use of enslavement of Africans, also submitted to forced christianization.

These practices upset the European thinkers of Renaissance humanism, such as the Spanish dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who witnessed these abuses and denounced the atrocities against native populations of the Americas. “Everyman has within himself the entire human condition”, wrote Montaigne, also steeped in that humanism, suggesting that the barbarians were not the indigenous people being massacred and that we, the Europeans, “surpass them in all sorts of barbarity”. That debate remained constantly alive during the Enlightenment movement, with Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau also taking stances.

Yet Europeans pursued the practice of slavery for centuries. And although it was a widespread practice in the world, whether in the Ottoman Empire, in Asia or in Africa, its magnitude at the hands of Europeans and of that extension of Europe in the New World which became the Americas ended up identifying Europeans with slavery.

The risks of the critical mind

Overcoming the scholastic dogmatism of the Middle Ages, when science was part of theology, philosophers such as the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon have paved the way to the emergence of the critical mind, i.e. the freedom to challenge established beliefs. They thus provided another foundation of humanism and of a seismic upheaval in the fields not only of science and the humanities, but also of theology. Triggered by catharism, successive heresies such as John Wycliffe’s Lollardy in England and hussitism in Bohemia, although severely repressed, ushered in the Reformation and its sequels, such as bloody religious wars throughout Europe.

But it also provided new frames for the critical mind in the fields of science and the humanities, although even the handling of knowledge was fraught with danger in times of Inquisition. Copernicus’ revolutionary work on heliocentrism had to be published after his death and later became a forbidden book. Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and astronomer, ended up burnt alive at the stake and Galileo was compelled to abjure his discoveries to save his life. The great pedagogue and philosopher Comenius was forced to flee Poland where his library and twenty years of his works were burnt down. Leviathan, the master treatise of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was deemed blasphemous and heretical by both the Catholic Church and the Church of England. As Victor Hugo famously noted in his 1846 speech, “At the beginning of the last century, the Spanish Inquisition was still omnipotent (…) In the first half of the XVIIIth century, from 1700 to 1750, the Holy Office claimed no less than 12,000 victims, 1,600 of whom died at the stake. Well, listen to this. In the second half of the same century, the same Inquisition claimed only 97 victims. And of those, how many pyres did it set up? Not a single one! What occurred between these figures? (…) there was only this, a moral intervention. Voltaire and France have spoken, the Inquisition is dead.”[2] Epitomized by Enlightenment, the critical mindset has infused European intellectual history throughout. Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont holds it for paramount and French, Lithuanian-born, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has extolled, in European thought, the power of the “spirit of freedom”, which encompasses, beyond democracy, a refusal of destiny, of predetermination, and a need to keep the game open for new possibilities.

The mixed blessing of European civilization

Notwithstanding the powerful contribution of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism to a universalist understanding of mankind, the notion of civilization predominantly served as a rationale for postulating the superiority of its European version over primitive societies. Sometimes it was meant in good faith, as an incentive to share its benefits with less advanced societies, under the banner of a mission civilisatrice. Victor Hugo, a strong supporter of it, countered the very conservative general Bugeaud, who was hostile to the colonization of Algeria: “our new conquest is a happy and great thing. It is civilization trampling barbarity. It is an enlightened people which will reach out to the people in the obscurity. We are the Greeks of the world, it is up to us to enlighten it”[3]. That very general nevertheless became entrusted with that task, which ended up in massacres, atrocities and famine, causing, altogether, between 500,000 and 1 million deaths within the native population. It also gave way, in the wake of darwinism, to pseudo-scientific justifications of racism and postulates of inequality between races. Such postulates provided all European powers with alibis, under the guise of spreading civilization, for their colonial ventures and their imperialist ambitions. This drive reached an apex with the 1885 Berlin conference, where those powers agreed on carving up Africa, opening new strings of atrocities.

In the wake of the American Spanish War of 1898, British author Rudyard Kipling urged, in a famous poem, the United States to “take up the White Man's burden” from the hands of a weary Britain and to conquer and colonize the Philippines. That “savage war of peace” Kipling called for, cost their lives to 100,000 natives. Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton University, praised the "new world order" created by European political and commercial expansion, in which "no nation can live any longer to itself" and where "the East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will it or no, the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it."[4]

Popularized by such authors as Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau, Englishman Houston Chamberlain or German Paul de Lagarde, theories of racial supremacy emphasized an Aryan race associated with a “German race”, feeding ideologies such as the völkisch movement in Germany, the craving of a vital space (Lebensraum) for the German people and later, after the outburst of nationalism which was World War I, nazism.

A legacy of struggles

So, when former Prime minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki claims in a speech in Heidelberg 2023 that “it was Christian Europe that gave birth to a civilization which respected human dignity more than any other. That civilization is worth protecting”[5], his assertion deserves, to say the least, close examination. Yet one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater: the European experience has produced a wealthy body of ideas, of concepts, of knowledge and of method that inspire, seduce and shape minds way beyond the shores of Europe or of the West.

Today’s European legacy is the product of centuries of workings, struggles, convulsions, of social conquests, of legal and political battles, fought against absolutism, abuse, oppression, arbitrariness, injustice, censorship and dogma, all sorts of deprivation of the individuals’ rights. Those endeavors were not taken up by the catholic Church as an institution, but by individuals or groups imbued with values and ideals, such as freedom, truth, justice, peace, dignity, equality of rights, solidarity, autonomy and responsibility, benefitting indiscriminately to each human being, and hence having a universal reach. Such principles might have their roots in Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, or in the New Testament, but they had often to be fought for, by believers and non-believers, against the powers in place, whether religious or secular, before they could become enacted as law or accepted as norm. Claiming Christianity as the matrix of European civilization, as Morawiecki did, must therefore be looked at against the backdrop of that struggle between its most reactionary, or obscurantist, face on one hand, and its more progressive one on the other hand.

That is not to say that whatever defines itself as progressive ipso facto becomes virtuous. We must indeed remind ourselves that even before being the breeding ground of fascism and nazism, two related ideologies which engulfed the continent in the deadliest war in human history, Europe has also been the cradle of communism, first as an ideology before becoming a totalitarian system that at its height ruled close to one third of mankind. While mesmerizing a significant part of voters in many European countries, communism has never been freely chosen by them as a form of government. It only extended its reach to Central European countries by being imposed by Stalin in the wake of Nazi defeat. The excesses prompted those nations – Poland in the first place – to shake off the yoke of Moscow. And they did that in the name, precisely, of those European values of dignity, freedom and democracy that had been promptly trampled upon by communists after their accession to power. This certainly legitimates excluding communism from the legacy of Europe, as it is antagonistic with all European values. Still, besides Russia, which reinstated many of the methods of previous regimes, the five remaining leninist regimes keep ruling over 1.5 billion people, i.e. some 20% of mankind.

The advent of Europe

The outcome of a World War II that devastated Europe in the first place and the need to resist to the communist threat have combined to shape the profile of post-war Europe, first under the protection of the United States, enshrined in the 1949 Washington Treaty that created the Atlantic Alliance, and then with the Schuman Declaration of 1950, that ushered in the European Coal and Steel Community. This second initiative, based on a meeting of minds with two other Christian-Democrat leaders, Konrad Adenauer and the Italian Alcide de Gasperi, aimed at laying the ground for a durable peace between historic enemies, a goal no set of Christian values had previously been able to secure.

Although initially limited to six countries, it has fulfilled that ambition and has been the crucible, through both functional and geographical expansion, of the European project. One remarkable achievement has been the peaceful exit from the communist straitjacket of all Central European countries, despite territorial disputes and thanks to the prospect of joining the European Union, in sharp contrast with the fate of Yugoslavia during those early post-Cold War years. Luuk van Middelaar, a philosopher with a hands-on experience of European affairs, has likened that process to the christianization of the Middle Ages: “just as the area of Christian civilization gradually spread northwards and eastwards from the Roman Empire, the ‘acquis communautaire’ of the Treaty of Rome is now completing its work”[6].

The strength of the European project, though, does not result from goodwill, but from the rule of law and the mutual trust it has generated. The failure of the interwar collective security system under the Covenant of the League of Nations had prompted the victors, essentially the US, to enshrine in the UN Charter, a binding treaty, the principle of sovereign equality between states and the prohibition of the threat or use of force. And a French jurist, René Cassin, co-authored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Although not a binding treaty, its language has been enshrined and expanded into a web of European treaties, from the European convention of Human Rights (1950) to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), later integrated into the EU Treaty, i.e. legally binding for all member states.

This set of rules, which compel all member states, govern relations between them, their relations with third countries, but, more importantly, provides for all facets of political liberalism in the domestic realm. Interestingly, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty created a citizenship of the European Union, placing citizens under its protection. According to that set, while there is no explicit requirement of a written constitution, the legal provisions of the treaties must find their way in a constitutional framework guaranteeing the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. The rule of law must therefore protect, in each country, the inviolability of dignity, and all freedoms, of thought, of conscience, of religion, of expression, of information, of assembly and association. It must guarantee privacy to the citizens, equality before the law, as well as between women and men, non-discrimination against minorities. Although solidarity and social welfare remain national prerogatives, member states have agreed to europeanize some of their norms. Lastly, the rule of law must also secure political rights allowing for a representative democracy, accountability of the elected personnel to the people and political pluralism.

Securing the rule of law

That legal system, enshrined in the Treaties, benefits therefore from an institutional mechanism that aims at compliance from Member states. Both the European Commission and the European Court of Justice remain the real guardians of the treaties, after the article 7 procedure, steered by the peers, proved ineffective to bring back to their duties Hungary and Poland, which strayed away from their obligations. Opening of infringement procedures and withholding EU funds has worked with Poland insofar as a new, pro-European, government won the parliamentary elections in the fall of 2023. But it has been defeated by the blackmailing power that the Hungarian Prime minister enjoys within the European Council. Still, the threat of that mechanism has a deterring effect. This safety net is essential to protect the rule of law, which is the backbone of the European project, from the temptation of Member states to nibble away EU prerogatives. Beyond attempts by the two afore-mentioned countries, claims to that end, regarding the hierarchy between EU and national legal norms, have been made by mainstream politicians brandishing sovereigntist slogans to jockey with national-populist parties. Regression in that field would weaken the rule of law, which is the cornerstone of legal and political integrity of the EU.

If freedom and dignity embody the soul of Europe, those ideals are more tangible for its citizens than they have ever been in history. And they appeal, thanks to their universality, to peoples of a world which is increasingly becoming an ocean of illiberalism, autocracies and dictatorships. The number of liberal democracies has shrunk, from 43 some 15 years ago, to 32. Most of them are in Europe, which remains an archipelago in that ocean, and a beacon of freedom and democracy for civil societies struggling for the same values and ideals. They look at that beacon to help them defend against constant and massive violations by states of human rights enshrined in several multilateral instruments pertaining to rights.

Europe in the world

Unsurprisingly, challenges to the European project are numerous, coming not only from the risk of unraveling caused by internal forces, but also from the tectonic forces of geopolitics. Epitomized by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the collapse of a collective security system predicated on international law has confronted the European Union with new roles it was not prepared for. While the burden of providing security on the European continent predominantly lies on the shoulders of the Atlantic Alliance, Europeans must envisage all contingencies and Luuk van Middelaar has called for Europe to become a geopolitical actor in its own right. Dwelling further on its religious metaphor, he has invited the European project to “free itself from a Pauline conception of time”, a present defined by the interval between a founding event – the resurrection – and salvation. Transposed to the EU, this time frame consists in a patient awaiting, outside of the ordinary historical time, of a new political order. Such an eschatology, he argues, must be shed to allow for the EU to become, by undergoing its “Machiavellian moment”, a geopolitical actor able to address the tremors of the world.

“Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue”, according to French moralist La Rochefoucauld. Providing an illustration of this famous maxim, some powers have chosen to challenge the western claim of the universality of human rights by mimicking the relevant practices. It is ironic, indeed, to read in the February 4, 2022 joint statement of presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, that “democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States” and that “Russia and China as world powers with rich cultural and historical heritage have long-standing traditions of democracy, which rely on thousand-years of experience of development, broad popular support and consideration of the needs and interests of citizens”... Regarding human rights, they add, in tortuous wording, that “their universal nature should be seen through the prism of the real situation in every particular country, and human rights should be protected in accordance with the specific situation in each country and the needs of its population”[7]. To counter the western discourse, a new concept has appeared, that of a “state-civilization”, suggesting that some large states embody more than just a nation, a civilization in its own right that warrants a different set of rules and values. Chinese and Russian scholars have been tasked to flesh out the concept and to spin theories to make it an integral part of the relevant foreign policy doctrines. But the outcomes are so far rather murky and hollow.

Another challenge pertains to the ways in which this universalist message is conveyed beyond our shores. Too often it has been burdened with proselytizing and patronizing attitudes, triggering accusations of double standards, grievances that were sometimes not undeserved. This partly explains the backlash that the “collective west” has, for a few years now, experienced coming from the so-called “global South”. To put it on the right tracks, novel approaches are warranted, and while not lowering guard in the defense of human rights, the dialogue Europeans have with civil societies of the world should be infused with that critical mind which was paramount in the emergence of those values and principles that define the European soul today.

[1] Victor Hugo, Discours devant Chambre des Pairs, 19 mars 1846.

 [2] Victor Hugo, Discours devant Chambre des Pairs, 19 mars 1846.

[3] Adèle Hugo, « Conversation avec Bugeaud », Choses vues, 1841, cité par Pascal Melka, Victor Hugo. Un combat pour les opprimés, Paris, La Compagnie littéraire, 2008, p. 376.

[4] Woodrow Wilson, “Democracy and efficiency”, The Atlantic Monthly, LXXXXVI, 1901, cited by Julian Go, “American Colonial Empire: the Limit of Power’s Reach”, Items & Issues, vol. 4, n° 4, Autumn-Winter 2003, New York, SSRC.

[5] Mateusz Morawiecki, Europe at a historic turning point, keynote speech at the University of Heidelberg, March 20, 2023.

[6] Luuk van Middelaar, Le Réveil géopolitique de l’Europe (Paris: Collège de France, 2022), Chap. 1.

[7] “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development”, Beijing, February 4, 2022.