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2 Europe is not the sum of its
parts By Spengler
Apropos of the debate over a European
constitution, it should be remembered that Europe
did not arise as an agglomeration of nations. On
the contrary, Europe existed before any of its
constituent nations, and the unified Europe of
Church and Empire created the nations along with
their languages and cultures. As individual
nations, Europe's constituent countries will die
on the vine.
That, sadly, is the way
things are headed. Europe's leaders on Thursday
announced another tilt at a European constitution,
after the rejection of a first draft in French and
Dutch referenda in 2005. The prospect of an
all-powerful entity in Brussels, less
accountable to voters than
national governments, continues to provoke
sufficient revulsion that the European summit
eschewed the word "constitution" in favor of the
euphemism "institutional settlement".
Pope
Benedict XVI raised hackles by insisting that the
European constitution make reference to the
Christian heritage of the continent, not only
among European secularists, especially the
government of France, but also of course in
Turkey, a Muslim country that aspires to European
Community (EC) membership. In fact, Benedict could
have put the matter even more forcefully. There is
no reason for Europeans to adopt a secular
constitution. Absent the Christian mission that
created Europe, the destinies will diverge of the
European peoples, to the extent that no common
policy will be perceived as fair and just.
Hilaire Belloc's famous quip - "Europe is
the faith, the faith is Europe" - was precisely
correct. Europe came into being before a single
Frenchmen or German was born, at the crowning of
Charlemagne as Holy Roman emperor in AD 800.
Voltaire was only partly correct - the Holy Roman
Empire was neither Roman nor an empire, but it was
holy. European monarchs donned the robes of
ancient Rome like small children playing dress-up,
and the power of their emperors was more symbolic
than real. But the unifying concept of Christendom
is what made it possible to create nations out of
the detritus of Rome and the rabble of invading
barbarians.
Why do European nations exist
in opposition to Europe? That fact, I believe, is
not a measure of Europe's political maturity but
rather of its decadence. The German language in
its modern form was born at the court of Emperor
Charles IV at Prague, when Teutonic grammar was
standardized on the Latin mold. Dante Latinized
his local Tuscan dialect to create an "eloquent
vulgate". The Catholic monarchs imposed the
Castilian language on the fractious Iberian
tribes, without complete success, as the survival
of philological relics such as Catalan and
Galician makes clear.
Why is there a
Germany, and not merely a Brandenburg, Bavaria,
Franconia, Swabia and Hanseatic League? Why is
there a Spain, and not merely a Navarra, Andalusia
and Castile? It is because European languages and
European literature made possible a common
discourse within the great national divisions.
Europe's common faith and the institutions that
supported it created this common culture as an
expedient for worship and administration. Europe
is the faith, for the faith gave birth to
Europe.
Under Church and Empire the
nations owed fealty to a higher power by virtue of
the authority of faith. Its common language was
Latin, and its ultimate authority was pope rather
than emperor. The empire was weak, but it was
holy, as a series of German emperors discovered
when they attempted to substitute their own
secular power for the ultimate authority of faith.
Henry IV stood bareheaded in the snow for three
days waiting for Pope Gregory VII to reverse his
excommunication in 1077; the Staufen dynasty came
to a terrible end after its prolonged war with the
papacy in the second half of the 13th century.
Without the faith, Europe's civil society could
not exist, and a challenger to the authority of
faith, no matter how powerful, ultimately must
fail.
Nationalism as an antipode to Empire
did not effervesce from the rising bourgeoisie, or
develop out of Protestantism. It was the invention
of Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis
XIII. As I have reported elsewhere, [1] Richelieu
for the first time proposed that the welfare of
Christendom could be represented in a single
European nation, whose particular interests thus
defined the interests of the Christian world. In
that spirit Richelieu kept the Thirty Years' War
raging until half the population of central Europe
was dead.
Europe's nationalism of the 19th
century was a response to France, specifically to
Richelieu's successor Napoleon Bonaparte. One can
trace the roots of nationalism to Romantic
interest in the songs and stories of the European
peoples, to Johann Herder and Johann Fichte and so
forth - but it should be
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