A nineteenth century view of Europe – is it still the same?

Citation

Coleman, J. (2001), "A nineteenth century view of Europe – is it still the same?", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413dab.004

A nineteenth century view of Europe – is it still the same?

A nineteenth century view of Europe – is it still the same?

John Coleman

Keywords: Europe, Politics, History

The controversial historian, James Anthony Froude, saw the scene in continental Europe as a dangerous balance of power game which England would only inflame more by meddling in it. I want to illustrate this in this article with some fragments from his diaries and other writings and then ask the question whether the European Economic Community, the European Community and now the European Union is not in reality a continuation of the balance of power politics which evolved on the continent since the fall of the Roman Empire, but within the circumscribed context of a union which has the advantage, admittedly a very big one, of being economic rather than military.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century Froude wrote:

I regarded the Reformation as the grandest achievement of English history, yet it was equally obvious that it could never have been brought about constitutionally according to modern methods. The Reformation had been the work of two powerful sovereigns, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, backed by the strongest and bravest of their subjects. To the last up to the defeat of the Armada, manhood suffrage in England would at any moment have brought back the Pope. Thus I thought Carlyle was right, and more than ever attached myself to him. He had endless worshippers. A thousand voices, as he said to me, told him he was a great man. But scarce one was a disciple, scarce one would do what he bade them do. I, for my solitary part, believed in him, and in all that I thought or attempted I allowed his judgement to guide me. Thus I was no more enthusiastic than he about the great Exhibition [of 1851], and cared as little for what was called progress and the glorification of liberty. Liberty, as I understood it, meant the freedom which a man wins when he is master of his trade, the freedom which he wins as a moral being when he has conquered his lower nature, is no longer led astray by passion or inferior motive, but can stand amidst temptation by his own strength, can govern himself and so is fit to direct others. The liberty which means emancipation from restraint, the liberty which will leave the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, the worthless and the worthy alike, free to do as they please and have an equal voice in the commonwealth, appeared then to me and appears now a delusion, and the demand for it to be one of those epidemics of passion which at various periods have swept over the human race: an epidemic like that of the Crusades, which appears while it lasts to be the holiest and noblest of causes, and is looked back upon when over as insanity. The Crusades fever lasted 200 years and cost Europe 6 million lives. The Revolutionary Liberty fever will perhaps last as long and cost as much more. There is an irony in nature which corrects, even while the fever is on, the extremity of extravagance. The Prince's Exhibition was to have inaugurated an era of universal peace. Within two years of its close we were launched into the Crimean War. It was not a beautiful thing to see: a Crusade reversed, but, like the others, farmed by popular enthusiasm. The newspapers ordered it. The politicians, afraid for their seats, spoke and voted as they were required. Lord Palmerston provided a watchword. He dared to say that it was a war of civilization against barbarism; the Turk representing civilization and the Russians the other thing. Lies are costly when believed in. At the bottom, perhaps, the true cause of the business was the ambition of certain European statesmen to make a United Germany an ambition which could not be realized unless the strength of Russia was for a time paralysed. France and England were made cat's paws to take the chestnuts out of the fire. The result was something. It freed Italy. It did enable Germany to become a great nation. It cost Russia 200,000 lives and gave the Ottomans a renewal of their lease of existence for another quarter or half century. England spent 80 millions of money, sacrificed 100,000 brave men, exhibited an administrative incompetence which realized absurdly Carlyle's description of Downing Street, obtained a certain amount of imaginary glory and real discredit. England, France, Italy, and Turkey, with Austria neutral, had succeeded at last in wresting from Russia half a single town and a treaty which was soon torn to pieces. Our reputation as a military power fell under a cloud, and the Crimean War was followed almost immediately by the Indian Mutiny. Events in India were in singular contrast with the incapacity which had degraded the Crimean administration. The English nature had not degenerated. Englishmen high and low are the same men who won our Eastern empire under Clive and Hastings. A mere handful of English soldiers and civilians – surprised, divided, scattered over the face of the enormous peninsula, decimated by treachery and massacre – faced in the field the native army which they had drilled, defeated them, stormed their fortified cities, delicate ladies facing shot and steel as coolly as their husbands, and by the rapidity, the completeness, and stern resolution with which they crushed the universal revolt taught the world to know that the blunders at Sebastopol were no measure of the English strength. India had been spared the invasion of constitutionalism, and British India statesmen and generals were free to use both brain and hand. In great extremities the eloquent tongues fall silent. The heart of the nation is in its armies. Constitutional anarchy would have ruined Rome. French soldiers saved the credit of the Revolution. The sword of Cromwell had to rescue the cause of the Civil Wars from the weak generosity of the Long Parliament. The rule of a democracy, said a Roman historian, is bad by necessity, for it depends on the votes of the majority, and the majority of men are always fools, while the gods did occasionally set the single wise man at the head of things. The suppression of the Mutiny gladdened the heart and kindled the spirit of every Englishman who was proud of his country.

Froude clearly believed in patriotism but absolutely not in that form of nationalism that believes in subduing others, imperialism in the aggressive sense. As he said in a letter to Lady Derby in 1880, when Disraeli's Conservatives had been routed:

I am glad that there is to be an end of "glory and gunpowder", but my feelings about Gladstone remain what they were. When you came into power in 1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This is gone – gone for ever. The old England of order and rational government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a moderate triumvirate – Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to reasonable people as "Asian Mysteries", tall talk, and ambitious buffooneries.

Waldo Hilary Dunn, Froude's most recent biographer, points out that his reflections on his country's history led him to the same conclusions as George Washington:

Washington left as a legacy to his countrymen a warning never to entangle themselves in European complications. The Americans have remembered the lesson and have acted upon it. They do not fret themselves into agitation over the "balance of power" … Inevitably and properly the English colonies will desire to imitate America's example… Therefore it is quite certain that if it be England's intention to adhere to her old pretensions, if England persists that she will be the arbiter of Europe (although on the European continent she owns not an acre, save Gibraltar Rock, and never can acquire an acre), the colonists will wisely decline a nearer union with us. Even now the present light connecting thread lays them open to serious danger. Those who meddle in quarrels in which they have but an artificial interest are likely in the end to make enemies of all who are vitally concerned. It is possible I do not say it is probable – that if England adheres to these courses she may provoke again, as she has done before, a European combination against her as a general nuisance. She may find her supremacy even on her own ocean disputed by the united fleets of injured and resentful powers; ugly visitors may look in upon her undefended colonial harbours; ugly demands may be presented at sea towns like Melbourne, with threats of shell and rocket if they are refused. To these casualties the colonies are liable already. In a political union with us they would have to share the cost of the ambitious elevation which it pleases us to claim – a cost incalculably great, and incurred for objects which prudent men will not think to be worth the outlay. If the colonists are as wise as I believe them to be, they will resolutely refuse to take on themselves any such dangerous obligations. Glory we may gain in these contests; but glory as barren as it will be hardly won…We may sink our enemies' ironclads, we may ruin their commerce, and we may spend in doing it our hundreds of millions which we shall leave posterity to pay. If the English people are so enamoured of their European position that on these conditions they mean to cling to it, they are masters of their own destiny. But let them understand that in choosing this course they will part company with the rest of their kindred. The empire of the New World, the empire of peace and prosperity, they abandon forever. Now in this our own generation we stand at the parting of the ways. Choose whom you will serve – whether the old spirit which you call honour, and which another age may call madness and dishonour; or the spirit which in the fire and cloud led these millions of our brothers out of the Egypt of vain ambition, into the promised land of industry and self respect –

• •

  Choose, and your choice shall beBrief, and yet endless:

briefly made, and endless in its consequences. To me, English statesmen seem like the man who had 100 sheep, and left his 99 to stray and forsake him if they pleased, and wandered off after the worst and most scabbed of his flock –after some phantom of prestige, some vapoury image, like that which mocked Ixion. What are Europe and its dissensions to us, that we should heap tax on tax, add ship to ship and battalion to battalion, because a few million souls are to pass from one sovereign to another – because Germany is growing stronger than France, or Russia is gaining ground against the Turks? The balance of power! Why is the balance of power more to us than to America? If other nations are strong, let us make ourselves strong. But the pretence itself is but an excuse. No other country dreams of meddling with England. Our danger, when it comes, will be, as it always has been, from our own meddling first with others. Let the Great Powers go at it, exhaust their treasuries, take the labourers from the field and the horse from the plough, arm the one with rifle, and yoke the other to the cannon. Let them convert Europe into an arena, where the bears and base dogs shall tear each other for age after age, and where each generation shall follow in the bloody footprints of its predecessor. But let it be understood that we mean, for our part, to be henceforth spectators of these performances, and that we will act in them no more. The Channel marks us off from the Continental stage. The enterprise of our own people has built another for us – a stage where we fear no rivals, and can play in contrast our own drama of peace. If we need allies, let us turn our faces, not eastward to Europe, but westward beyond the Atlantic. I have said much of the Americans. They are the people of the future. In the Americans we may read the character and tendencies of the ages that are to be. They are sprung, like us, from the loins of our own fathers. They claim an equal share with us in the traditions of English history; and their great men trace their descent with as much pride from historical English families. Theirs, as well as ours, are the Plantagenet and Tudor princes. Theirs are Drake and Raleigh, Burghley and Cromwell. Theirs are Chaucer and Shakespeare and Bunyan. In our modern poets and men of science, in Scott and Byron, in Burns and Tennyson, in Macaulay and Carlyle, in Tyndall, in Huxley, in Darwin, in John Mill, they will allow us no exclusive right of possession. Let any Englishmen, whom the Americans have learnt to respect, go over among them and see if he is received as a stranger. Their voluntary and instinctive sympathies prove that between the American and the English people there are bonds uniting them closer than those which unite any nations on the globe, and only the action of what are called the governing classes among us prevents the political relations from becoming as intimate as the spiritual. An American alliance is worth all French, Australian, German, Italian, Greek, Turk – all European alliances together. We two nations standing back to back, with our separate governments, but one in heart and one in policy, they with their enormous continent, we with a no less vast colonial union, may then spread into an innumerable company of English, Scotch, and Irish born freemen; and, secure in our own deserved prosperity, we may leave Europe to work out its own destiny. Can imagination picture a fairer prospect for us? There would be no risk of war then, for who would have a motive to quarrel with us? Who would dare to quarrel with us? There would be no danger of colonial disintegration, for what colony would dream of leaving so splendid an association? Little need should we then have to boast of the army corps that we can move, or of the number of campaigns that we can bear, or to start in alarm when fools talk of England's prestige being in danger. From the sure and serene heights of power and confidence we could smile at the envy which sneered at England's decadence. Ninety years ago, when all generous hearts were beating with hope at the opening of the French Revolution, Jean Paul said: "On the sunset gate of this century stands written, 'Here is the way to virtue and wisdom', as at the western gate of Cherson stands the proud inscription, 'Here is the way to Byzantium'. Infinite Providence, thou wilt cause the day to dawn!" Three generations have gone by, and, for Europe, that day has not dawned. It is still "the twelfth hour of the night". The "birds of prey are still on the wing", and dock and arsenal ring loud as ever with preparations for mutual slaughter. How is it with England? It may please our princes and aristocracies to challenge their parts in this hard and lurid prospect. Kings and emperors and dukes and field marshals are all that they know or care for in the human family. The rest of us fly after the vain glitter of these people as moths fly about a candle. We all feel honoured in paying taxes, and killing and being killed, at these illustrious persons' bidding. I feel honour in nothing of the kind. Let the "rest of us" look to ourselves. America saw its way long ago, and cast their lots with their own kindred. There lies the way to our Byzantium – not eastward through the Sea of Marmora, where queen and cabinet are trying to drive us, but far off through the sunset gate which leads into the New World. In a change of policy, in a disregard forever of a past which is out date, in the hearty embracing of a new future, when all English-speaking races will have one interest, and English and Americans, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, shall rank side by side for the common good of mankind there, and nowhere else, lies the solution of the colonial problem. Give us that, and we need look no further. The British Empire will be held together by a magnetism which no local or selfish ambition can then decompose. All difficulties will vanish then. No province of such an empire will be denuded of its wealth, denuded of its genius, denuded of its self-dependence, where the life-blood of the heart will flow freely to the furthest extremities. I saw in Natal a colossal fig-tree. It had a central stem, but I knew not where the centre was, for the branches bent to the ground and struck root there; and at each point a fresh trunk shot up erect, and threw out new branches in turn, which again arched and planted themselves, till the single tree had become a forest, and overhead was spread a vast dome of leaves and fruit, which was supported on innumerable columns, like the roof of some vast cathedral. I saw an image, as I looked at it, of the future of England and her colonies, if the English people can read the signs of the times.

Dunn commented:

The future was to be far worse than even Froude foresaw. "I have no hope that things will go right or that men will think reasonably," he wrote in 1885, "till they have first exhausted every possible mode of human folly."

"Perhaps", wrote Dunn in 1963, "it is still too early to hope that every possible mode of human folly has been exhausted."

There are clearly far-reaching implications both for the recent European adventure and for the "modern constitutional methods" in these extracts. I believe that neither Europe nor any of the other continents of the world will achieve harmony and peace until the principle implied in Froude's image of the fig tree is understood and realised through the characteristic branches of their own civilisations.

An article in The Times on 23 February 2000 by Sir Trevor Lloyd-Hughes, Harold Wilson's Press Secretary and Chief Information Officer to his government asks the question "Is Blair the New Wilson?" and reveals a surprising side of Wilson's character which shows that little has changed since the events of the days over which Froude agonised:

Harold Wilson, too, a more modest chap than our present Prime Minister, had his Walter Mitty moment over Europe. We were in Bonn for the funeral of Dr Adenauer, the German Chancellor. Over three days, Wilson buzzed bee-like among the heads of the six EEC countries, the seven European Free Trade Area nations, President Johnson and others. He told me: "This working funeral is the most comprehensive get-together of European leaders since the Congress of Vienna in 1815." Smarter than Talleyrand, he was running diplomatic rings round them all, even de Gaulle. Jean Monnet, "father" of the Common Market, boosted his euphoria by opining that de Gaulle was opposing our entry into the EEC because he was afraid of yielding to Wilson the political leadership of Europe. And so, in the embassy garden on the final morning, Harold confided to me: "Trevor, my real, deepest ambition is to become the master of Europe's destiny."

Only Churchill was not in this tradition and perhaps saw the world in its various circles as struggling to achieve the principle of the "fig tree". The mistake that Hitler, Napoleon and Heath made, though of course the last by different means, was that they all wanted to create a centralised Europe with one great trunk standing alone. The first two failed. So perhaps will the last.

The principle of the "fig tree" also underlies the thinking of Leopold Kohr, which is clearly expressed in his great work The Breakdown of Nations. But perhaps the last word on the subject should be reserved for the story of Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference. Stalin is reputed to have said to Churchill that after the war only the eagles would count and Churchill retorted that he wanted a world where all the small birds would be able to survive.