Is Europe’s Mighty Story Over?

Frederick Jackson Turner famously highlighted the frontier as a theme in American history, but the frontier of what? Carleton Hayes, a leading mid-twentieth century historian of Europe, posed exactly that question to highlight the fact that the United States faces the Atlantic as well as westward.  The country also looked back to a heritage grounded in classical antiquity no less than forward into the future, which became a new frontier after the one Turner invoked had closed. Amidst the storm and stress driven by political dynamics and the understandable push for intellectual independence, Europe remains a touchstone for the United States, however much some may grumble. It has been the cultural and institutional hinterland for Americans as they pushed westward from the Piedmont and Mississippi to forge a nation.  

The rejection of America’s European heritage over recent decades has obscured the stories every student once knew. “Europeans invented the modern world,” as Walter McDougall notes in opening The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Europe, but the attacks on Western Civilization as the source of the world’s ills broke a chain of memory in education and public culture alike. Starting with the question of what it means to be civilized and drawing answers from antiquity, he narrates Europe’s ascent from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century with its contradictions and complexities. The candor McDougall adopts looks beyond the popular “just so” stories of unfolding progress—or malicious iniquity—to highlight the paradox and irony of human affairs. Unintended and unanticipated consequences followed events as men and women grappled with conditions they faced. People, both great and otherwise, drove events in a context shaped by geography, technology, and the history they inherited. Theories never capture the fullness of the process, with abstract explanations always falling short with misleading answers to complex questions. Human agency shaped the drama of what he rightly calls a mighty continent.  

McDougall picks up the subject with a deep commitment to the craft of teaching and long scholarship in American history. Starting as a specialist in twentieth century international relations, he earned a Pulitzer Prize for a history of the Space Age. Later work examined American foreign policy as the United States turned from the “promised land” of its first century to become the twentieth-century “crusader state” deploying power across the globe. McDougall discussed the contradictions of an American civil religion that drew on Protestant Christianity while becoming a secular competitor to it. Two volumes tracing United States history from colonization through the late nineteenth century highlighted localism along with the hustling, acquisitive, and restless character of the American people. Concern about the country’s place in the post-Cold War world turned him back to Europe, where both America and the modern world generally have their roots. Throughout those decades, he also taught undergraduates European history from the Renaissance to the near present. The Mighty Continent presents an epic worthy of a storyteller with McDougall’s critical eye and deft touch. 

Western civilization began in the ancient Near East, with Greece and Rome refining influences shaped by the Hebrew legacy and Christianity. Defining civilization points McDougall to a distinction that set Europe apart and shaped its history. Techne captures “the arts of survival and manipulation of nature which endow societies with power,” while themis describes “justice, philosophy, religion, and art—in other words, cult and culture.” McDougall stresses the symbiotic relationship between techne and themis. Their specific influences on each other can be difficult to discern. Themis is drawn from Greeks, Israelites, and Latins in a synthesis formed amidst the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, which shaped techne, with the combination of themis and techne spreading from the Mediterranean across Europe. The medieval growth of that system—influenced further by Germanic people with their own dynamic culture and pressure from Islam to the east—forged Christendom. Feudalism emphasized contract within a system of law and reciprocal obligation that had lasting effects downplayed much later. The Middle Ages saw not only an expansion of Europe from core regions between the Mediterranean and North Sea, but also sustained economic growth bolstered by trade and technology. Christian faith drew upon reason in a formidable synthesis that shaped how Europeans thought about the natural world as well as themselves. Legal rights, separation of powers, and representative government emerged in a period that was anything but backward. Here lay a foundation for developments that would cross the Atlantic and beyond. 

The Renaissance, McDougall writes, shows the imprecision of historical labels. Was it a rebirth of classical antiquity—really pagan antiquity—or something new that made humanity the measure of all things? Delineating when phenomena like the Renaissance and the Reformation began or ended also posed problems. Both looked back into the Middle Ages and had precursors. Humanism that underpinned the Renaissance grappled with a clash between two visions—one humble regarding the present life and hopeful of eternity, the other partly reversing it with a boastful approach to now and complacency about later. Calling the tension characteristic of modernity, McDougall relates it to the tensions between techne and themis. Which should predominate? More importantly, what do we mean by progress? Those questions would also characterize modernity. 

Instead of walking readers through a series of greatest hits from a forgotten survey of Western Civilization, McDougall uses episodes to highlight contradictions and what Immanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, which never made anything straight. Stories reveal deeper meaning. The Reformation started as a moral revival and efforts to remedy abuses in the Western Christian Church, but it became a revolution that overturned institutions, culture, and practice. Figures promoting reform saw their efforts turn in very different directions as others took a hand. A Scientific Revolution had dead ends and missteps that looked anything like unfolding progress. The Whig Interpretation of political history as a linear passage to greater liberty is similarly misleading. Rulers who expanded their power and centralized authority faced a backlash, but their efforts responded to fears of disorder and the result often brought its own oppressions.  Parliamentary government in England, for example, rejected both royal absolutism and military despotism over a brief Puritan interregnum. 

After Rome, Europe witnessed tensions between the political diversity of multiple entities and occasional ambitions to restore imperial unity. What had been lost, however, proved hard to recover. Edward Gibbon revealingly thought that competition among European states improved technology and military effectiveness. It also checked misrule. Attempts to establish a universal monarchy sparked resistance by blocking coalitions. Phillip II, Louis XIV, and Napoleon all inspired opposition that checked their efforts. Religious differences envenomed political rivalry in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that ended with the Peace of Westphalia acknowledging the sovereignty of independent states. An international system based on that principle and upheld by a combination of customary international law and balance-of-power politics defined Europe. Its history would be one of nations rather than empire. 

Those nations took different paths. Absolute monarchs pushed state-guided development in Prussia and Russia. Frederick II of Prussia called himself the first servant of his realm, a new and revealing description of rule. The Habsburg lands of Austria remained an administrative patchwork while the United Kingdom of Great Britain left development mainly to private initiative with great success. Acts of Parliament gave permission to enclose lands or build canals, with other technologies left entirely to entrepreneurs. France relied on bureaucratic absolutism to mobilize resources, but that system failed under the pressure of financial demands imposed by policy choices. A revolution that emerged from the resulting failure of governance betrayed the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity it proclaimed.  

An industrial revolution and the expansion of European power across the globe would characterize a century of general peace between 1815 and 1914. It did not always seem peaceful, with dislocations from population growth, technology, and cultural change, but most conflicts were fought outside Europe during those decades. A storm of steel unleashed by World War I in August 1914 followed miscalculations by leaders in all governments, which created lasting trauma. Techne had devoured themis with catastrophic results. Lost chances to establish lasting peace in what became the interwar years brought what McDougall calls the multiple holocausts of World War II. Europe revived during the post-1945 Cold War, where an American-led West stood against the Communist Soviet Union. Eventual victory, however, brought malaise across Europe, with failed projects reinforcing a pessimism seen today. 

Is that the end of Europe’s story? The hypothesis popularized by Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy had ended history by its triumph faltered as civilizational conflict in the new millennium erupted. Ironically, most of the real clash was within Europe—and indeed the United States—between those who rejected their societies on whatever grounds and the majority who resisted them. The pessimism McDougall sees in collapsing European birthrates points to a different kind of end that still raises the same question. He also notes the strengths that made Europe powerful, with a self-correcting internal dynamic that addressed injustice and mended flaws. Anti-traditionalism was itself part of European tradition. Other civilizations lack the pivotal capacity for critical self-awareness. 

To answer the question above, we might look to a hero in McDougall’s story. Charles De Gaulle, in a defiant speech from London on June 18, 1940, asked listeners whether France’s defeat was the last word. No, he continued firmly with a call to resistance that also outlined a theory of victory. The turn from memory and tradition that McDougall believes underpins Europe's cultural pessimism need not be the continent’s final word. The factors that made Europe a mighty continent may yet spark recovery. Much the same can be said for the United States. Articulating a synthesis of themis, techne, and a devotion to the best of our civilization is the foundational resource we have for defeating the cultural and political pessimism evident in our day. 

William Anthony Hay is the associate director for public programs and professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University.