The liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet control in 1989, followed by the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the establishment of the European Union at the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, seemed to many Europeans to be the realization of the long-held dream of a Europe that was finally at one with itself. In the following decades, EU membership grew from twelve to twenty-eight, embracing many Central and Eastern European countries. In 1993, the European Union member states agreed on the “Copenhagen criteria” to determine the eligibility of nations to join the Union. There were, however, also growing pressures, with a renascent nationalism that culminated in the departure of the UK from the EU in 2020. Chapter 10 focuses on the ways in which the EU came increasingly to be seen as failing to embody the true spirit of Europe, the critique coming both from those who championed national cultures as well as from those who, while feeling that there was a “democratic deficit,” wished to see a reformed EU. The chapter considers a wide range of contemporary views from thinkers and writers across Europe, including Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Umberto Eco, Jürgen Habermas, Régis Debray, and Leili Slimani.

In the Second World War years, the long-dreamed-of idea of a politically united Europe finally began to be realized, if only in Western Europe. At the heart of this project for a united Europe was the principle of “unity in diversity,” with the diversity lying in the distinct national cultures across Europe. Chapter 8 focuses first on the various reflections on the idea of a “European spirit” discussed at major international conference in Geneva in 1947, before considering the ways in which the notion of “unity in diversity” served to provide an ideological underpinning for this new Europe. Among the many writers and thinkers discussed in this chapter are T. S. Eliot, Denis de Rougemont, Georg Lukács, Stephen Spender, Georges Bernanos, and Karl Jaspers. The chapter highlights just how challenging it is to break with Eurocentric, Euro-supremacist, and Euro-universalist agendas even when the emphasis is placed on diversity. The case of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Fascists in the interwar years, is particularly instructive. As this chapter shows, he was among the most ardent advocates of a united Europe, his arguments having profound implications for any progressive idea of Europe.

Much of the history of the idea of Europe has played out in Western Europe, with the important exception of Russia in the nineteenth century. However, in the twentieth century, there were a number of influential reflections on the idea of Europe in both Central and Eastern Europe, notably by writers and thinkers including Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera, and Julia Kristeva. Chapter 9 focuses on these reflections from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the complex view of Europe from Turkey, particularly through the work of the pro-European Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, as well as those from former European colonies in North Africa and South America, with key figures in this regard including the violently anti-European Frantz Fanon as well as the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the writer Jorge Luis Borges. This chapter considers some of the ways in which the traditional center/periphery conception of Europe might be rethought, while also revealing the extent to which Eurocentric and Euro-supremacist assumptions are far from being limited to the Western European discourse on the idea of Europe. It also reflects on the abiding idea of Europe as essential a Christian culture.

Surveying the history of the idea of Europe from its origins to the present day reveals a profoundly troubling pattern, namely that, all too often, seemingly progressive ideas of Europe have been shaped by Eurocentric, culturally supremacist, and even racist assumptions. Even the championing of rationality, justice, democracy, individual freedom, secularism, and tolerance as what Tzvetan Todorov terms “European values” can contribute to this Eurocentric and Euro-supremacist tendency. The Conclusion reflects upon the challenge posed by such a history, and argues against the longstanding conviction that a cosmopolitan idea of Europe is diametrically opposed to what thinkers such as Denis de Rougemont dismiss as an “anti-European” nationalism. Rather, it is essential to acknowledge that throughout its history the idea of Europe has been for the most part Eurocentric, Euro-supremacist, and Euro-universalist. If the idea of Europe is to warrant any future, it must be shaped by a spirit of self-critique and by an openness to those cultures that have for so long been dismissed as non-European. That, the Conclusion argues, is the key lesson to be learned from the history of the idea of Europe across two and a half millennia.

Following the revolutions across Europe in 1848, nationalist conceptions of Europe became increasingly dominant, culminating in the founding of the new nation states of Italy (1861) and Germany (1871). The period also saw an intensification of European colonialism, culminating in the “scramble for Africa” towards the end of the nineteenth century. European nationalism and colonialism were increasingly shaped by an ethnological idea of the European, with racial theories of Homo Europaeus justifying colonial barbarism (as exposed by Joseph Conrad at the end of the century). Alongside this particularly dark period in the history of the idea of Europe, Chapter 5 also considers the work of those who sought to champion a cosmopolitan idea of Europe, including Victor Hugo’s calls for a United States of Europe and Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “good European,” most fully embodied for Nietzsche by Western Europe’s Jewish population. As this chapter reveals, however, Hugo’s idea of Europe was profoundly Francocentric, while Nietzsche’s incorporated deeply disturbing elements of the emerging race theory. The chapter concludes with an assessment of growing sense of European decadence at the end of the century, as articulated by writers such as Max Nordau and Georges Sorel.

If the eighteenth century was dominated by a French Enlightenment idea of Europe, following the French Revolution and then the Napoleon Wars, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a German Romantic idea of Europe, dominated by strains of cultural nationalism. On the one hand, German Romantics such as Novalis looked back nostalgically to medieval Christendom for the model of a united Europe; on the other hand, thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Schlegel brothers dreamed of a Europe dominated by German culture. The roots of the shift from universalism to nationalism lay in the work of writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who challenged French Enlightenment universalism with an insistence upon cultural differences. While Herder also challenged the prevailing Eurocentrism and Euro-universalism, the post-Napoleonic era saw both a growing nationalism across Europe and an intensifying European imperialism that would culminate in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explores the complex relation between the idea of Europe and that of nationalism in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the ways in which the ostensibly antithetical ideas of the universal and the national were integrated into the idea of Europe.

One of the abiding questions in the discourse on the idea of Europe since the Enlightenment has been whether Russia belongs within European civilization, or is essentially Asiatic. Following Peter the Great’s attempts to Europeanize Russia at the end of the seventeenth and in the early years of the eighteenth century, culminating in the construction of St Petersburg as a European city, Russia’s relation to (the rest of) Europe became a hotly disputed question both within and beyond Russia when Peter Chaadayev published his Philosophical Letters (1826–31), in which he claimed that Russia lacked all the qualities of a European nation. This led to a long-lasting debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles in Russia, culminating in the profoundly Slavophile views of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who took issue in particular with the Westernizing views of Ivan Turgenev. Russia’s relation to Europe was also explored by Western European writers, including Germaine de Staël and Astolphe de Custine. This Western European vision of Russia was often profoundly negative, with Russia being seen as an Asiatic threat to Europe. Chapter 4 explores this enduring debate on Russia’s relation to (the rest of) Europe, one that continues to this day.

While the history of the idea of Europe extends back to classical antiquity, the writing of that history only commenced in earnest after the Second World War. The principal histories of the idea of Europe in the immediate postwar years included those by Federico Chabod (1961), Heinz Gollwitzer (1951), Denys Hays (1957), and Carlo Curcio (1958). None of these works, however, sought to cover the entire history of the idea of Europe. It was Denis de Rougemont (1961) who first charted the history of the idea of Europe from its inception to the present. The Introduction considers the principal arguments made in those as well as in more recent histories of the idea of Europe, highlighting the ways in which many of them are grounded in culturally supremacist assumptions. It then considers those values that have come to be considered as distinctly European, including rationality, justice, democracy, individual freedom, secularism, and tolerance, before outlining the book’s overall argument, namely that while it is essential to hold onto those values, it is also necessary to rethink the idea of Europe in a spirit of self-critique and humility, and to break with any simple opposition between the European and the non-European.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, which many saw as the result of nationalist rivalries, the immediate postwar period was dominated by concerns regarding European decadence and by dreams of a united Europe that would be able to regain its geopolitical power in a new global landscape increasingly dominated by the United States of America and by Russia. The French writer Paul Valéry set the agenda by arguing for a genuinely “European spirit” that had arisen out of the confluence of classical antiquity and Christianity. He was followed in this endeavor to champion a distinctly European spirit by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann von Keyserling. Chapter 6 charts the development of this idea of a European spirit, as well as the various plans for a politically united Europe, most notably as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s proposals for what he termed “Pan-Europe.” The chapter reveals the cultural supremacism that taints many of these attempts to identify a European spirit, as well as emphasis placed on the need for European to re-establish its geopolitical and geo-cultural influence.

The idea of Europe first emerged in ancient Greece, featuring in the work of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Aristotle, among others. The classical myth of Europa describes the abduction of an Asian princess by the king of the Greek gods, and the classical idea of Europe served to distinguish Hellenic culture from an Asian world viewed highly negatively as an enslaved collective ruled by autocrats. In imperial Rome, the idea of Europe served an important geopolitical purpose, underwriting Roman civilization as European. While the rise of Christianity led to the idea of Europe being elided in favor of that of Christendom as opposed to Islam, following the discovery of the New World the idea of Europe became ever more central to reflections on civilization and what was seen as Europe’s civilizing mission beyond its geographical borders. Chapter 1 focuses on the emergence of the idea of Europe in classical antiquity, before considering its role in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, following the discovery of the Americas and the new sense of the European that arose at that time, as the idea of Europe and European civilization slowly came to displace that of Christendom.

Following the devastating Wars of Religion that had plagued large parts of continental Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new cosmopolitan spirit concerned with putting an end to internecine conflict as well as establishing the idea of a European civilization that was entitled to dictate the nature of any future world civilization. A preoccupation with the idea of Europe ran like a red thread through much Enlightenment thinking, commencing with a tract by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre first published in 1712 on the best means to establish peace in Europe, and including contributions from major writers and philosophers of the period, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Kant. In many respects, the idea of Europe during this period was of French, with the French language being considered the natural European language and French civilization the model for European civilization. Chapter 2 considers the flourishing of the idea of Europe during the Enlightenment, and in particular the way in which it served to a new global vision of civilization. It was in this period that European civilization and values were seen as universal, this Euro-universalism underlying the idea of cosmopolitanism.

In the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Europe faced a dramatic economic downturn and mass unemployment. Visions of a peaceful cosmopolitan Europe were soon replaced by ever more extreme nationalist visions, which reached their most appalling incarnation in the racist-nationalist ideology of the Nazis. The 1930s also saw continued attempts to champion and defend a European spirit, by, among others, Julien Benda, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. However, the distinction between such efforts and the nationalist view of Europe grew ever weaker, and following the outbreak of the Second World War, and particularly after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, it was the Nazis who were appealing to the idea of European civilization as threatened by the Asiatic. The non-European was, for them, incarnated by the Jews and by the Russians. As Chapter 7 seeks to demonstrate, no simple opposition between the cosmopolitan and the nationalist view of Europe stands up to scrutiny, since both were rooted in ideas of Euro-supremacism and the cosmopolitan view almost always took one national culture as its model.