Europe before Europe:
The Transformation of European Consciousness
after the First World War
Katiana Orluc
This paper is a very condensed version of my June Paper, and although I had to cut out quite a few things, I very much hope that it is still understandable and without too many repetitions. The idea of the June Paper, i. e. beingpredominately theoretical, makesthis paperunfortunately not as entertaining as a “real” historical narrative… However, I promise that the next paper will be purely historical and therefore much more fun to read.
1.Central Questions and Problems
Today, it is an agreed fact (sic!) that Europe, given its lack of a clear geographical structure, is merely and exclusively an intellectual construct.[1] Attempts at defining Europe thus often hinge upon problems of semantics as well as of politics and ideology. Moreover, Europe is itself a structuring force and therefore cannot be reduced to an idea, an identity or a reality. Yet, as Gerard Delanty observes, “what is real is the discourse in which ideas and identities are formed and historical realities constituted”.[2]
However, when investigating this discourse on Europe two main directions can be taken. The first is to assume - in a somewhat absurdly teleological way - as has often been done within the historiography of the European idea, a kind of linear development of the latter through the centuries, finally culminating in the European Union. This construction ex post facto is conditioned by an evolutionary understanding of the European idea, which is grounded almost exclusively on ‘high’ literature while mostly neglecting the historical context, and at the same time tries to establish some kind of order by explaining cause and effect relationships. There exists, of course, some continuity between, for example, the inter-war period and the post-Second World War one – be it merely the fact that the same people advocated a common Europe. Yet, it seems much more fruitful to assume ambivalence and discontinuity, thus leaving more room to explore various different and maybe competing narratives of the European idea.[3]This implies, as Jacques Derrida has suggested, a final rupture with the notion of European unity, understood as a unity of history with a beginning and an end.[4]
Right from the start the discussion about the European idea requires some conceptual clarifications. A distinction between the European idea, European consciousness and the European discourse has to be drawn. The idea of Europe has been a trope in philosophical and political writings since Antiquity, long before people started to identify themselves with Europe, to see themselves as Europeans. The European consciousness that has thus emerged, and, as I will argue in this paper, particularly after the First World War, was mainly constructed against a category of otherness, although a sense of solidarity and belongingness did also prevail. The discourse on Europe represents the larger constellation in which the two other categories can be inserted.
Taking heed of these remarks, my interest is to explore the discourse on Europe in the interbellum. The particular focus here is the formation and transformation of European self-images as a historical subject in the process of the construction of European self-consciousness that emerged with the experience of the First World War. The context surrounding this discourse provides the fulcrum for my investigation. Thereby I will discuss both the modality in which the discourse on Europe was contextualised in the different national settings and the factors which conditioned this modality. What kind of European self-images surfaced after the First World War? How did these notions develop and in what way were they transformed in the course of the following two decades?
Having said this, it is the basic assumption of my project that the great interest in the idea of a common Europe after the First World War was conditioned by specific political, economical and cultural experiences and interests. The questions are obvious: Who advocated a united Europe? What were their specific interests and purposes in doing so? What were their aims? And when did the envisioned Europe change its form and contents, and for what reasons? To what extent is the idea of a united Europe a “modern” or a “conservative” project? Or stated otherwise: In what way does the European discourse relate to social and political reality, and in what way does the political context condition or frame the perception of a future common Europe? And last but not least, how far does the discourse itself construct a certain reality?
In this sense, I am aiming first, at identifying the social scope of the idea of a common Europe, second, at grasping the persuasive or binding power that it exerted on specific political and social groups, and finally, at recognising the impact that changes in political and social structures had on the idea of Europe, with respect to shifts in experience and expectations.
2.Methodological and Conceptual Framework[5]
2. 1.Conceptualising Begriffsgeschichte and Discourse Analysis
My dissertation project is mainly conditioned by a conceptual approach - a particularly challenging enterprise if one is interested in the combination of intellectual and social history, since “concepts are both indicators of and factors in political and social life”.[6] Concepts are at the crossroads between language and society, they are “like joints linking language and the extra-linguistic world”,[7] since there exists no social activity, be it political argument or economic transaction, without verbal expression. By defining extra-linguistic structures, basic concepts, according to Reinhart Koselleck, condition political events. He argues that concepts affect social and political transformations since it is through them that a horizon is constituted against which changes are visible, projected into the future, or contrasted to the past.[8]
However, Koselleck’s argument does not imply that a one-to-one relationship exists between language and reality, since concepts are also affected by political reality, which cannot be transformed overnight. Rather, the correspondence between both dimensions has to be understood through its discrepancies and differences. Begriffsgeschichte has thus concerned itself with the reciprocal relationship between conceptual continuities, changes and innovations on the one side and large-scale structural transformations on the other. In the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe[9] two methods are used to discover the manifold meanings that concepts have acquired over time; by first applying a number of linguistic techniques to the historical analysis of concepts, that is by situating them in their historical context, and by second relating variations in their meaning to structural changes: “Words will be understood in their context, social and political; the relationship between word and content will be interpreted; the result of this inquiry will be defined in terms of the resulting concept.”[10]Accordingly, the methodological or epistemological quality of Begriffsgeschichte, or of historical semantics, lies in its capacity to connect structure and event while at the same time avoiding a simple linear argumentation leading from the one to the other, i.e. in its ability to transcend contextualisation.
Walking along the path of Reinhart Koselleck allows me to undertake both a synchronic and a diachronic examination of the concept of Europe. On the one hand, linking the different images of Europe to political reality, i.e. the changing visions of a future Europe due to transformations in the political and social life. What did Europe mean at that specific moment and for whom was this concept of any relevance? What could a person intend by writing about Europe in a given situation? To what extent did, for example, the Treaty of Locarno influence European self-images? Did it transform the perceived decline of Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war into a revived hope for a European hegemony of the world? On the other hand, the diachronic analysis enables me to detect if other terms and concepts have been added or omitted. Who spoke about the Occident instead of Europe? Should a United States of Europe, or a Paneurope, or a European Union be envisioned? At the same time the diachronic dimension unravels the discrepancies between social and political reality and the idea of a common Europe. What were the metaphors or tropes that never changed? Was there a general search for continuity, which would not permit any transformation at all? Or did changes occur in the meanings of Europe, which, and be it only seemingly, did not refer to their historical context?
Given its complexity, being controversial and contested, Europe is indeed what Reinhart Koselleck has coined a basic concept. It is the ambiguity of the concept of Europe, which turns it into a prime example. As Hans Erich Bödeker has pointed out, it is the concept of ambiguity and multiple meanings of a basic concept which “make[s] it possible to draw methodological links to questions of social history and ideology criticism”,[11] and both categories are fundamental to my approach. It is impossible to understand a phenomenon such as the European discourse in the inter-war period without being aware of its social and political foundations and repercussions, which also encompass its ideological implications.
Moreover, basic concepts are both an inescapable and irreplaceable part of political and social vocabulary, because they merge different experiences and expectations in such a way that basic concepts become indispensable to the formulation of the most important and urgent themes of a specific time. Taking this argument one step further, this means that no social behaviour or political action can take place without the existence and availability of a stock of basic concepts which have lasted over a long period of time, although they might have had different meanings and varying degrees of importance.[12]
A concept, however, cannot be understood merely by itself and without any reference to other concepts. It belongs to a whole referential framework in which these define each other reciprocally, thus forming part of a larger structure of meaning, a semantic field, a network of concepts, or a discourse. Following this line of thought, I will not only focus my interest on the varying meanings of Europe that is on a semasiological analysis; I will also pursue an onomasiological analysis,[13] thus giving attention to both the relating terms or parallel concepts, which have been used to describe Europe, as for example, the Occident, Abendland, the West, Christianity, civilisation and modernity, as well as to opposite concepts or counter concepts, such as the Orient, the East, Asia and barbarism. In fact, restricting ourselves to the word Europe would be misleading, since one of the most frequently used terms to describe Europe was the Occident; although both terms were also used synonymously. The former was most often employed in liberal and socialist discourses, while the latter was particularly favoured in Catholic circles, evoking connotations of medieval Christendom in Europe, united against the pagan Orient.
This leads me to a different but not less important question. To what extent are these semantic fields to which concepts belong similar to discourses? How are discourse analysis and Begriffsgeschichte interrelated? Reinhart Koselleck has himself attempted to provide an answer to this question. He came to the conclusion that both approaches were interwoven and even depended upon each other: a discourse needs concepts in order to express its object and “an analysis of a basic concept requires command of both linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts, including those provided by discourses”.[14] Unfortunately, Koselleck did not elaborate this question any further.
One way of approaching this problem is, of course, to refer to Michel Foucault’s works. I will not presume to summarise his complex work, but simply - and merely for the purpose of my study - try to find some way of relating discourse and basic concepts. The starting point of Foucault’s “archaeology” (understanding it as his version of intellectual history) seems quite similar to that of Begriffsgeschichte. The aim of archaeology is to “increase differences, [to] blur the lines of communication, and [to] try to make it more difficult to pass from one thing to another”.[15]Unlike traditional intellectual history, which moves as if it were in a continuous current from one epoch to another in order to demonstrate the relevance of one particular idea over a long period of time, archaeology is, metaphorically speaking, digging in all directions but at only one site to unearth the particularities of a specific discourse. In contrast to Begriffsgeschichte, however, Foucault’s method is, by only investigating one site, one body of texts, which has an externally defined unit, treating his historical object only synchronically.
In his historical writings, Michel Foucault leaves the beaten track of the notion of a continuous evolution of reason and replaces it with notions of discontinuity, non-identity, ambiguity and rupture. By the same token, Begriffsgeschichte broke with the conventional history of thoughts and ideas, whilst at the same time it was concerned with overcoming the limitations of historical philology. The founders of Begriffsgeschichte sought to move away from writing the history of a single idea by defining their objects of analysis as parts of whole semantic fields. A basic concept, therefore, is always part and parcel of a wider range of synonymous and antonymous terms. Besides this similar shift in historiography, which took place contemporaneously, both approaches are concerned with linking language and the extra-linguistic world, text and reality. According to Foucault, texts should be studied as if they were large-scale social phenomena in order to prevent the historian from reducing the texts to the intentionality of a constituative subject. The goal is to de-ideologise historiography, or to use a Foucaultian term, to dehumanise it, avoiding thus the historian’s identification with the past.
According to Foucault, intellectual history is no longer the analysis of the ideas of specific subjects, rather, its object of investigation now is the discourse, which is treated by him as an objective and social phenomenon. He goes on in his argumentation to state that “discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.”[16]The individual is integrated in the historical process; this means that Foucault is not categorically burying the author as such but is historicising the function of the author. Being thus liberated from their subjects, discourses are constituted by different layers of statements, which follow certain rules of formation. These rules are responsible for defining the transformation of different objects of a given discourse, their variations through time, the ruptures or breaks produced in them, and “the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence”.[17]In The Order of Discourse Foucault gives a similar definition of discourses, which “must be treated as discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other.”[18] Analysing a discourse, thus, means deciphering, first, the connections between these different statements - looking for the interrelations and as well as for the paradoxes and, second, the stable concepts they depend upon, and finally, the topic which they are developing.
If one understands a discourse as a group of statements, as a network of communication, and discourse analysis as a means by which to uncover the fragmentation and incompleteness of this network, to reveal its discrepancies and antagonisms with the ultimate aim of unravelling the interdependence of discourse and power, structure and event, it can be said to be compatible with and even complementary to conceptual history. This seems particularly true if one follows Hans Erich Bödeker’s assumption that “Begriffsgeschichte is not primarily concerned with the study of individual linguistic signs, but with the epistemic conditions and discursive strategies enabling their meaningful use”.[19]
For the purpose of my research, i.e. investigating the European discourse in the inter-war years, I tend to situate myself methodologically between Reinhart Koselleck and Michel Foucault. First of all, this means using an enlarged definition of discourse, as I have outlined above. Second, I will not pursue a discourse analysis in the strict Foucaultian sense, with its primary focus on social practices and the institutionalisation of power, but in the sense of a public debate and controversy about a politically (understood as cultural, social and economical) relevant topic beyond which models of reality and their changes are hidden.
Therefore, I do not fully agree with Foucault’s claim that the intention of the author, the subject, is irrelevant for the purposes of discourse analysis. In contrast, I do believe, as Edward Said puts it, “in the determining imprint of individual authors upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism”[20]or, as in my case, “Europeanism”. Said continues his argument stressing that the unity of a large group of texts is created by their mutual reference to each other. “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors”.[21]