Postwar

Europeans are more numerous and heterogeneous than ever before. Any account of their common condition at the dawn of the twenty-first century must begin by acknowledging that variety, by mapping the overlapping contours and fault-lines of European identity and experience.

The term ‘mapping’ is used advisedly. Europe, after all, is a place. But its frontiers have always been more than a little fluid. The ancient boundaries—of Rome and Byzantium, of the Holy Roman Empire and Christian Europe—correspond closely enough with later political divisions to suggest some genuine continuity: the uneasy encounter-points of Germanic and Slav Europe were as clear to an eleventh-century writer like Adam of Bremen as they are to us; the medieval frontiers of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, from Poland to Serbia, were much as we find them today; and the concept of a Europe divided between east and west at the Elbe would have been familiar to the ninth-century administrators of the Carolingian Empire, had they thought in such terms.

But whether those long-established boundary lines are any guide to the whereabouts of Europe always depended upon where you happen to stand. To take one well-known case: by the eighteenth century most Hungarians and Bohemians had been Catholic for centuries and many of them were German speakers. But for enlightened Austrians, ‘Asia’ nevertheless began at the Landstrasse, the high road leading east out of Vienna. When Mozart headed west from Vienna en route for Prague in 1787, he described himself as crossing an oriental border. East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth.

Because much of Europe until recent times was not divided into states but instead accommodated within empires, it helps to think of the external markers of the continent not as frontiers but as indeterminate boundary- regions—marches, limes, militargrenze, krajina: zones of imperial conquest and settlement, not always topographically precise but delimiting an important political and cultural edge. From the Baltic to the Balkans, such regions and their inhabitants have for centuries understood themselves as the outer guard of civilization, the vulnerable and sensitive point where the familiar world ends and barbarians are kept at bay.

But these borderlands are fluid and have often shifted with time and circumstance: their geographical implications can be confusing. Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians have all presented themselves in their literature and political myths as guarding the edges of ‘Europe’ (or Christianity).[387] But as a brief glance at a map suggests, their claims are mutually exclusive: they can’t all be right. The same is true of competing Hungarian and Romanian narratives, or the insistence of both Croats and Serbs that it is their southern border (with Serbs and Turks respectively) that constitutes the vital outer defensive line of civilized Europe.

What this confusion shows is that the outer boundaries of Europe have for centuries been sufficiently significant for interested parties to press with great urgency their competing claims to membership. Being ‘in’ Europe offered a degree of security: an assurance—or at least a promise—of refuge and inclusion. Over the centuries it came increasingly to serve as a source of collective identity. Being a ‘border-state’. an exemplar and guardian of the core values of European civilization, was a source of vulnerability but also pride: which is why the sense of having been excluded and forgotten by ‘Europe’ made Soviet domination so particularly humiliating for many central and eastern European intellectuals.

Europe, then, is not so much about absolute geography—where a country or a people actually are—as relative geography: where they sit in relation to others. At the end of the twentieth century, writers and politicians in places like Moldova, Ukraine or Armenia asserted their ‘Europeanness’ not on historical or geographical grounds (which might or might not be plausible) but precisely as a defense against history and geography alike. Summarily released from Muscovite empire, these post-imperial orphan states looked now to another ‘imperial’ capital: Brussels.[388]

What these peripheral nations hoped to gain from the distant prospect of inclusion in the new Europe was less important than what they stood to lose by being left out of it. The implications of exclusion were already clear to even the most casual visitor by the early years of the new century. Whatever was once cosmopolitan and ‘European’ in cities like Cernovitz in Ukraine or Chisinau in Moldova had long since been beaten out of them by Nazi and Soviet rule; and the surrounding countryside was even now ‘a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse- drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights’.[389] Identification with ‘Europe’ was not about a common past, now well and truly destroyed. It was about asserting a claim, however flimsy and forlorn, upon a common future.

The fear of being left out of Europe was not confined to the continent’s outer perimeter. From the perspective of Romanian-speaking Moldovans, their neighbors to the West in Romania proper were blessed by history. Unlike Moldova they were seen by the West as legitimate if under-performing contenders for EU membership and were thus assured of a properly European future. But seen from Bucharest the picture changes: it is Romania itself that is at risk of being left out. In 1989, when Nicolae Ceausescu’s colleagues finally began to turn on him, they wrote a letter accusing the Conducator of trying to tear their nation away from its European roots: ‘Romania is and remains a European country…. You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you cannot move Romania into Africa.’ In the same year the elderly Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco described the country of his birth as ‘about to leave Europe for good, which means leaving history.’ Nor was this a new concern: in 1972 E. M. Cioran, looking back at his country’s grim history, echoed a widespread Romanian insecurity: ‘What depressed me most was a map of the Ottoman Empire. Looking at it, I understood our past and everything else’.[390]

Romanians—like Bulgarians, Serbs and others with good reason to believe that ‘core’ Europe sees them as outsiders (when it sees them at all)—alternate between defensively asserting their ur-European characteristics (in literature, architecture, topography, etc) or else acknowledging the hopelessness of their cause and fleeing West. In the aftermath of Communism, both responses were in evidence. While the former Romanian Prime Minister, Adrien Nastase, was describing for readers of Le Monde in July 2001 the ‘added value’ that Romania brings to Europe, his fellow Romanians constituted over half the total number of aliens apprehended while illegally crossing the Polish-German border. In a poll taken early in the new century, 52 percent of Bulgarians (and an overwhelming majority of those under 30) said that, given the chance, they would emigrate from Bulgaria—preferably to ‘Europe’.

This sense of being on the periphery of someone else’s centre, of being a sort of second-class European, is today largely confined to former Communist countries, nearly all of them in the zone of small nations that Tomas Masaryk foresaw coming into being, from North Cape to Cape Matapan in the Peloponnese. But it was not always so. Within recent memory the continent’s other margins were at least as peripheral—economically, linguistically, culturally. The poet Edwin Muir described his childhood move from the Orkneys to Glasgow in 1901 as ‘one hundred and fifty years covered in a two days’ journey’; it is a sentiment that would not have been out of place half a century later. Well into the 1980s the highlands and islands at Europe’s edges—Sicily, Ireland, northern Scotland, Lapland—had more in common with one another, and their own past, than with the prosperous metropolitan regions of the centre.

Even now—indeed above all now—fault lines and boundaries cannot be counted upon to follow national frontiers. The Council of Baltic Sea States is a case in point. Established in 1992, it comprises Scandinavian participants: Denmark, Finland,Norway and Sweden; the three Baltic countries of the former USSR: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Germany, Poland, Russia (and from 1995, doing violence to geography but at Scandinavian insistence, Iceland). This symbolic reassertion of ancient trading affinities was much appreciated by one-time Hanseatic cities like Hamburg or Lubeck—and even more welcome to the city managers of Tallinn and Gdansk, eager to position themselves at the centre of a re-invented (and Western-accented) Baltic community and take their distance from their continental hinterland and recent past.

But in other regions of some of the participating countries, notably Germany and Poland, the Baltic means little. On the contrary: in recent years the prospect of foreign earnings from tourism induced Crakow, for example, to emphasize its southern orientation and market its erstwhile incarnation as the capital of Habsburg ‘Galicia’. Munich and Vienna, though competing for cross-border industrial investment, have rediscovered nonetheless a common ‘Alpine’ heritage facilitated by the virtual disappearance of the boundary separating southern Bavaria from Salzburg and the Tyrol.

Regional cultural distinctions, then, clearly matter—though economic disparities matter even more. Austria