If Europe has a culture, is there such a thing as a European nation, asks Benjamin G Marti? In a piece originally published at Aeon, he cautions against historicizing this question and highlights its very contemporary dimension vis-à-vis today’s clash between Europeanist and nationalist visions of what Europe is.

Think of culture, of literature, music, philosophy, the fine arts, and it means thinking of Europe. ‘The idea of culture, of intelligence, of great works,’ wrote the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry in 1919, ‘has for us a very ancient connection with the idea of Europe.’ In an anthropological sense, of course, all peoples possess culture. But high culture – as conceived of by most people – continues to be essentially European. The notion that there is an essentially European culture, and that culture distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world, is very much alive. This idea, which Valéry thought ‘very ancient’ even in 1919, animates political discussion all over Europe today.
The idea of a coherent European culture is actually quite new. Scattered uses of the phrase appeared in the 19th century, but it was only in the 1920s and ’30s that the idea came of age. Those decades saw an unprecedented burst of attention for the idea of Europe, in which the age’s leading liberal intellectuals developed a compelling vision of the continent’s purportedly shared cultural identity. Influentially, Valéry cast Europe as a shared, intangible inheritance, rooted in ‘a desire for understanding and exchange’ among its nations. He thought this shared desire had produced a ‘European spirit’. For the Austrian playwright and librettist Stefan Zweig, non-material values defined Europe. Zweig thought Europe expressed its defining quality through cultural exchanges in the ‘supranational realm of humanism’. In 1932, bourgeois intellectuals across Western Europe celebrated the centenary of the death of the great German poet and polymath Goethe by casting him as the very model of European culture. Goethe was the embodiment of their ideal of Europe: cosmopolitan and sophisticated, curious and creative, committed to the highest humane, Christian and Enlightenment values.
For all of its optimistic rhetoric, it was fear that birthed this vision of European culture. The First World War, and the economic and political chaos that followed, led to a new call for European unity. By coming together politically and economically, supporters insisted, Europeans could avoid another catastrophic war and defend their primacy in the world. For Europe’s bourgeois intelligentsia, European unity presented an essentially moral or spiritual problem. The Great War had included a searing propaganda battle, in which French and British intellectuals cast out a ‘barbarian’ Germany from the community of civilised nations. Germany’s cultural elite responded by embracing the specificity of Germany’s virtuous Kultur against a supposedly decadent and vacuous West. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel declared in 1917: ‘The spiritual entity that we called Europe has been destroyed and it is unlikely to be rebuilt.’
On a global level, the rise of non-European powers also undermined the European identity of the continent’s elites. This identity had included a deep yet relaxed confidence in Europe’s global superiority. After the First World War, that confidence was harder to feel. The decisive role of the United States in ending the war – and the growing power of Hollywood movies and jazz music since then – had brought a new cultural juggernaut onto the world stage. To the east, the Russian revolution had installed a mighty ideological challenge to bourgeois European culture, one with threatening appeal among Europe’s masses. Perhaps, it seemed, Europe’s fractured elites no longer controlled the continent’s destiny nor its people’s tastes.
Feeling pinched between the US and Hollywood to the west, and Soviet communism to the east, some intellectuals set out to define and distinguish Europe, revising that old idea for a new and threatening age. Continental intellectuals had defined Europe by contrasting it to various ‘others’ for a long time. But by seeking to identify a distinctive European character against the US and the USSR, the continent’s newly ascendant geopolitical rivals, that process of defining Europe underwent an important transformation. Earlier generations had found Europe’s distinguishing feature in its Christianity. For centuries, what we call Europe (the word was rarely used) was more often called ‘Christendom’. Christendom referred to a physical and spiritual space contrasted to that of the Muslim Turk.
In the 18th-century Enlightenment, European elites began to highlight Europe’s distinction through the concept of civilisation. Based on pride in western science, reason and technology, this vision of Europe as the seat of civilisation, the epitome of human progress, flourished in the 19th century. ‘Europe’ grew into a shorthand for the continent’s claims to be the birthplace of universal values, expressed in science and technology, law and administration. The evident superiority of these values seemed to find confirmation in the ascendancy of Europe on the world political stage and in the European powers’ vast colonial empires.
By the 1920s and ’30s, however, even those who were still openly racist about non-Europeans could no longer claim that civilisation was unique to Europe. The war proved that although modern civilisation, in the sense of technological progress, might have been born in Europe, the US and the USSR had advanced in these fields at least as far as the old world. European intellectuals’ optimism about technology was in any case shaken by the war. Clearly this frightening shift of power meant that civilisation as scientific and technological superiority alone could no longer vouchsafe Europe’s special place in the world.
However, the continent’s intellectuals were not ready to give up their European exceptionalism. Their attachment to European distinctiveness led to an embrace and celebration of something else, something almost ineffable, that neither the US nor the USSR could ever claim: that was ‘European culture’. European culture, in contrast to crass American and Soviet materialism, was idealist and anti-materialist, defined especially by literature and the arts. Among Europe’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, the fine arts had enjoyed a semi-religious status, and were a logical place for intellectuals to seek refuge for their exceptionalism. Marking itself off from the ‘new’ societies of the US and the USSR, this European high culture traced its beginnings to ancient Greece and Rome. In doing so, it projected ‘Europe’ back to ages when the word was rarely used and meant little. ‘Europe’ in this way came to signify especially refined aestheticism and high culture.
It’s always been somewhat confusing. If Europe has a culture, is there a European nation? Are the cultures of Finland or Poland as European as the cultures of, say, France or Germany? Who gets to decide which works of art are representative of European culture? Must the continent be homogenised to foster a unified European culture? Wasn’t this fine arts and high culture vision of Europe socially elitist and politically conservative?
Some of these questions are again relevant today, amid the newly intense conflict between Europeanist and nationalist visions of what Europe and its culture (or cultures) really are. To answer them, it helps to remember that ancient verities are few. The old world is defined by relatively new ideas.
Benjamin G Martin is director of the Euroculture MA programme at Uppsala University in Sweden, and the author of The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (2016). Image creidt: Public Domain.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons, it gives the views of the author, and not the position of LSE Brexit, nor of the London School of Economics.
The above is an academic slant on an issue still extant and fluid.Regardless of the fact that the history of the world has been written from a European perspective, from a European’s perspective, and that the above is not agreed on the EU federalisation project, so it appears, European civilisation is a fact, even if it was built on an older civilisation, the Egyptian.The EU muddle will pass.Which way it goes will be determined by the electorates in European countries and other factors of influence.It remains to be seen whether Europe as a continent will go the way of Egypt and Greece.Rome is next in line to be ditched by the inexorable forces of manifestation.The Roman Empire was re-invented by the Roman Catholic Church.The EU, building upon the dregs of this old empire,is a faux-federalisation project pushed forward under the aegis of the forces of corporate globalisation based in the West, the which constitute not a new chapter in the European conquest of the world but a do or die attempt by the remnants of European colonial interests making another attempt to create a world empire and turning the countries which served as its foundation and still serve as its base into colonies as well.
There is more to Europe than the dregs of empire morphed into transnational corporate globalisers.On the other hand, to try and define the spirit of Europe as a continent by the failure to see a homogeneous mass of people constituting one people is not even what the EU project leaders do.Exactly the opposite, actually.The EU project attempts to mould the peoples of Europe into a sociopolitical-financial-economic entity, which they clearly are not yet, which would be called a federation, but which in fact would be run like the US and be an adjunct to that country.
Of course, that will not work out, or not for long.The spirit of Europe as a harbinger, carrier and developer of things European in the widest sense is still alive in Europe.Whether it will survive the current attempt by the European/Anglo-American forces, working at the behest of the international high finance movers and shakers, to forge a Pan-European vassal state remains to be seen.To create a god almighty mess in the Middle East and then try to import it into Europe so as to destroy law and order, the financial/economic, sociopolitical, cultural and spiritual fabric amongst the incumbents is a test of mettle and spirit of the European peoples collectively and severally.We know from history that such spirit moves when it dies amongst the people where it dwelleth, or did dwell.Except in the East, Eastern Asia, where there has been a continuous presence of spirit since the Arians moved there.Europe as a spiritual/cultural entity is in the balance.Perhaps it is fated to be blown to the four quarters of the Earth by the winds of change, who knows?But people have a choice there.