Heritage and history: Rivals and partners in Europe
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notably since the Renaissance and the rise of city-states, these cosmopolites became more numerous and increasingly at home throughout the continent. In the late eighteenth century consciousness of being European began to extend beyond these elite realms to a wider community of bourgeois participants. Ironically, the nationalist impetus propounded in the teachings of Herder and generated in opposition to the conquests of Napoleon stimulated a transnational awareness as well. Celebrants of the national uniqueness of folk life, languages, and vernacular cultures in Germany, Scandinavia, and Slavonic lands also found much in common with one another. And by the mid-nineteenth century folk-conscious heritage encouraged democratization throughout the continent, as well as in American lands settled by Europeans. ‘Europe’ had by then begun to symbolize ideals of progress and freedom against autocratic rule and social backwardness. Much of the impulse for European reform was couched in opposition to reactionary and repressive Hapsburg and Papal, Ottoman and Russian regimes, the latter especially demonized as non-European. At first largely French, the expression of European superiority became increasingly Britishbased. As Tennyson declaimed in Locksley Hall, ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.’ Conviction of racial and cultural pre-eminence validated European imperial sway over lesser breeds beyond the Continent. Hence the British in India distinguished themselves from mere ‘natives of India’ by terming themselves the 5 Crown’s ‘European British subjects’. As the century wore on, European political cohesion became a mystic trope among the Continent’s statesmen, however combative their nations continued to be. ‘The United Powers of Europe’, as Britain’s Prime Minister Gladstone put it in the 1880s, 6 ‘represent the civilized world’. Such sentiment peaked with the onset of the First World War (‘World’ meant Europe); ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’, Lord 7 Grey of Falloden intoned in 1914, and ‘we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. Fears about the survival of Europe were personified in the stage directions for Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1908), anticipating that conflagration. The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chain like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey green garment hemmed by the Urals and the Arctic Ocean. The point of view then sinks downwards, draws near the surface of the perturbed countries ... the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling [...]8 Out of this tragic war emerged the League of Nations, whose nascent European unity was doomed by American aloofness. The interwar decades intensified European rivalries. Only in the wake of the Second World War were serious efforts made to overcome age-old national rivalries through the aegis of a supranational European entity; only
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