Is Europe an imagined community?

Where we are going depends largely on who we are, and who we are depends largely on who we have been.

If the European Union is not really sure about where it is going and what it is there for – and the Euro-crisis that just goes on giving suggests that it is not – that is in some measure because of the continent’s historical amnesia.

The word ‘continent’ makes the point as Europe is not, by any acceptable geographic definition, a continent.

The Eastern border with Asia (currently considered the Urals) is entirely arbitrary and has been redrawn on a number of occasions.Cyprus is considered European and is an EU member state, despite lying far closer to Lebanon (about 160 miles) than to the nearest mainland European coastline (it is almost 700 miles from Greece). Malta, another EU member, is closer to Tunisia than Italy. European football competitions include Israel, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkey, as does the Eurovision song contest, which last year, bizarrely, also included Australia.

Europe, to adopt Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, is an “imagined community”.

This, note, is not the same as an imaginary community, but rather one in which that which binds it together is a (series of) social and cultural constructs; ideas, in effect. Those in Europe have been the classical world and Christianity; in Emmanuel Levinas’ words, “the Bible and the Greeks”.

These have, of course, varied in their duration and intensity, with some countries (Spain, Greece) experiencing prolonged periods of non-Christian rule, and others (effectively those north of the Rhine, the Danube or Hadrian’s Wall) having little or no classical inheritance.

Ideas are messy and rarely have clear boundaries. Nevertheless, it is without doubt the complicated and contentious intertwining of these two ‘ideas’ that gave Europe, and thence the European Union, its identity. Many either do not know or do not want to know this, as the debacle of the EU constitution testified.

Many of the Europe’s elite wanted to gloss over 1,300 years of European history – effectively from the fall of Rome to the birth of Voltaire – much to the Vatican’s annoyance. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in his opening remarks as chairman of a Convention established to write the constitution, rooted Europe’s “three fundamental contributions to humanity: reason, humanism and freedom” in Greece, Rome and the Age of Enlightenment. Eventually, the convention finally settled on the rather insipid, “drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” for its preamble, only to see the treaty subsequently rejected in referenda by France and the Netherlands and left unratified.

Let’s be clear: recognising both Europe’s foundational ‘ideas’ – the classical world and the Christian one – will not solve the problems or make straight all the paths for Federalism. But the alternative – a self-conscious cultural amnesia which locks away a millennium of history and pretends Marcus Aurelius gave birth to Immanuel Kant – will asphyxiate any serious attempt to articulate honestly what Europe is, and where it is going.

About the authors

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. He is the author of several Theos reports and a number of books, including Darwin and God (SPCK, 2009) and Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011) and most recently Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury). He is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ben Ryan is a Researcher at Theos. He first joined Theos as an intern in September 2013 and graduated to a researcher in early 2014. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge and also has an MSc in European Studies from the LSE European Institute. He is the author of A Very Modern Ministry: Chaplaincy in the UK.

The Theos report A Soul for the Union will be published later this year