Listening to Jeffrey Sachs’ historic address at the European Union Parliament on February 19 (full speech here, 15-minute extracts here, transcript here), I feel comforted in my deep conviction that European nations as such will not be able to take an active part in the multipolar game that is now being organized. Sachs does mention in passing the Baltic States, but makes no mention of France, Germany or Great Britain. Sachs’s geopolitical vision is about Empires. It is interesting because most Europeans are still thinking in terms of nations. And there is a widespread opinion among European nationalists that the European Union is the problem and that, if only nations would get back their national sovereignty (with a national currency, a national army, etc.), everything would turn out fine: France, Germany and Great Britain would continue their millennium-old rivalry and be great again. This will not happen. Europe will have to exist, one way or another, either as a sacrificial vassal of the United States as it is now—a puppet government, so alienated from the interest of its peoples that it insists on their being sacrificed even when the new emperor stops asking it —, or as an adult, self-confident but respectful partner to Russia and China.
My own understanding of the European tragi-comedy came from my research in medieval history (my PhD background and life-long interest), which proves without the shadow of a doubt that Europe was the victim of the intrigues of the Roman papacy (from Gregory VII to Innocent III and after) to prevent its unification under the leadership of the German “Roman Emperor” (or Kaiser). I have told this story in the first chapter of my book The Pope’s Curse, titled: “Failed Empire: The medieval origin of the European disunion”. I reproduce below the beginning of this long chapter.
Failed Empire: The origin of the European disunion
Europe was a civilization. From Charlemagne until the 16th century, European civilization was “Christendom.” It had Rome as its capital, and Latin as its language. But that unity was, in theory, purely religious. Rome was the seat of the papacy, and Latin the language of the Church, known only to a tiny minority. Europe therefore had a religious unity, but it had no political unity. Unlike all other civilizations, Europe never matured into a unified political body. In other words, Europe has never been an empire in any form. After the failure of the Carolingian Empire, too brief and too obscure for us to distinguish the reality from the legend, Europe progressively crystallized into a mosaic of independent and rival states. The outlines of these national states, which would become “nation-states” in the 19th century, took their basic shape in the 13th century.
In addition to their common religion, the principalities of Europe were united, throughout the Middle Ages, by their sovereigns’ kinship, resulting from a diplomacy based on matrimonial alliances. But this community of faith and blood did not prevent the European states from being separate political entities, jealous of their sovereignty and always eager to extend their borders.
In the absence of an overarching imperial authority, this rivalry engendered an almost permanent state of war. Europe is an ever-smoldering battlefield. Historian and political scientist Charles Tilly calculated that between 1500 ad 1800, European polities were at war during 80 to 90 percent of all years, and that things were even worse during the preceding 500 years. England alone was at war about half of the time from 1100 to 1900.[1]
If you think of Europe as a civilization, then you have to think of its deadly wars as civil wars. German historian Ernst Nolte did just that for the two global conflicts of the 20th century, which he saw as one long “European Civil War.”[2] Neither common religion nor family ties prevented European civilization from tearing itself apart with unheard-of hatred and violence. Remember that on the eve of the First World War, King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicolas II were first cousins and all defenders of the Christian faith.
The stated aim of the “European construction” from the 1950s onwards was to make these European wars impossible or at least improbable. But this project was an anachronism, because it started at a time when European civilization was already dead, with no vital energy left to resist being colonized by the new empire on the block. Ironically, English has become Europe’s de facto international language, even though England has never been fully integrated into Europe. English in fact manifests the cultural hegemony of the United States over Europe.
The European Union is not supported by any “civilization consciousness.” Many people still feel organically and spiritually connected to their nation, because, as Ernest Renan once said, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.” (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? 1882). But no one feels such connection to Europe, because Europe is not perceived as a spiritual being, endowed with an individuality, a will, and a destiny of its own. There has never been a great European narrative to unite in a common pride all these peoples crammed in the European peninsula. Each country has its little roman national, ignored or contradicted by those of its neighbors. The point was well made by Christopher Dawson in The Making of Europe:
European civilization … is a concrete social organism, which is just as real and far more important than the national unities of which we talk so much. / The fact that this truth is not generally realized is due, above all, to the fact that modern history has usually been written from the nationalist point of view. Some of the greatest of the nineteenth-century historians were also apostles of the cult of nationalism, and their histories are often manuals of nationalist propaganda. … In the course of the nineteenth century this movement permeated the popular consciousness and determined the ordinary man’s conception of history. It has filtered down from the university to the elementary school, and from the scholar to the journalist and the novelist. And the result is that each nation claims for itself a cultural unity and self-sufficiency that it does not possess. Each regards its share in the European tradition as an original achievement that owes nothing to the rest, and takes no heed of the common foundation in which its own individual tradition is rooted. And it is no mere academic error. It has undermined and vitiated the whole international life of modern Europe.
Writing in 1932, Dawson added: “Yet if our civilization is to survive it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and a sense of its historic and organic unity.”[3]
There are certainly some shared myths in European culture. Charlemagne for example. But the quarrels about him precisely illustrate the difficulty—as if Charlemagne had to be either French or German. The other big European myth is that of the Crusades. But the Crusades illustrate just as precisely the inability of Europeans to unite on a project for Europe. Through the Crusades, the popes sent Europeans to conquer a city in another part of the world, that was already coveted by two other civilizations (the Byzantine and the Islamic). Europeans were told that Jerusalem was the spiritual cradle of their civilization. There cannot be a more anti-European project. The Crusades, in fact, only exported national rivalries into the Middle East. It is true that they make a good story, but it is really a great lie, since their only lasting results were the destruction of Eastern Christendom and the reunification of the Muslim world, ultimately into a new powerful empire that would chip away parts of Europe before the end of the Middle Ages (more in chapter 2).
The Middle Ages, anyway, are the beginning and the end of the European grand narrative. After that, the average Frenchman knows almost nothing about the history of Germany, because he was taught the history of France, a little of the history of the world, but never the history of Europe. Basically, for most people, the notion of a “European civilization” calls to mind the Middle Ages and nothing else.
And that’s logical. Europe was a brilliant civilization during the central Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). But because this medieval civilization did not embody itself politically into an empire, it fragmented into several micro-civilizations, each of them playing its own imperial game against the others. And so we had, in the 19th century, a French empire, a British empire, and a German empire, all trying to destroy each other. They were colonial empires: having failed to create an empire at home, Europeans exported their rivalries in predatory conquests in every other continent. Great Britain, in particular, created its own empire in India. Ultimately, European peoples gave birth to the United States of America, an empire born in genocide and the most brutal slave-trade, fated to bring back the plague on its genitor.
Europe feels so little like an organism that, when the USSR tore away its eastern part, Western Europeans felt no pain, as Milan Kundera lamented in his memorable 1983 essay, “A Kidnapped West”:
The disappearance of the cultural home of Central Europe was certainly one of the greatest events of the century for all of Western civilization. … How could it possibly have gone unnoticed and unnamed? The answer is simple: Europe hasn’t noticed the disappearance of its cultural home because Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity.[4]
But what European cultural unity could have saved Central Europe, without a European political unity? There can be no political will without political unity.
The emperor and the pope
In the 21th century, wrote Samuel Huntington in 1996, “The world will be ordered on the basis of civilizations or not at all.” In this emerging “civilization-based world order,” “countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.”[5] Thirty years later, the idea has gained wide acceptance. A multipolar world is indeed being born, despite US efforts to kill it in the womb.
How will Europe fit in that world? Europe is a civilization, but it has no “core state”. It has always resisted having one. The European Union was actually founded after World War II on the explicite rejection of the notion of a core state. Because Europe wants to be a multipolarity by itself, it cannot be a pole in the global multipolarity. And so, according to Christopher Coker, author of The Rise of the Civilizational State, “Europeans cannot become a civilizational state. The fault lines across Europe have settled the question.”[6]
Europe is a failed civilizational state. It is incapable of playing a part in the new emerging multipolar world order, because it is not a unified “pole” with a civilizational field of its own, let alone with a voice of its own. As for European nations separately, they are not players in this game. The notion of their “sovereignty” may have had some meaning as long as they were sharing the domination over other continents; it is now an empty slogan. Such is also the conclusion of the French sociologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd in The Defeat of the West (2024). Questioning the axiom of the “nation-state” which has dominated geopolitical discussion since the second half of the 19th century (implicit in the very chart of the United Nations), Todd proposes “a post-Euclidean interpretation of world geopolitics,” based not on nation-states, but on their disappearance. In this new competition, Europe is the forgone loser.[7]
The big question therefore remains: Why has Europe never reached the maturity of an imperial state, which would have made its kingdoms, duchies and counties parts of a great unified organism, with a will and a voice of its own—and, today, the possibility of an independent destiny?