EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

Europe as a republic: the story of Europe in the twenty first century

Europe in the Twenty-first Century

In the two centuries following the French Revolution, Europe was transformed from a factionalized collection of feudal, hierarchical, Christian monarchies into an affluent community of peaceful, democratic, secular, and capitalist states. Along the way, these changes were shaped by upheavals of revolution and war. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789 first raised ideas of individualism, human rights, and popular sovereignty. The Napoleonic wars and the Peoples’ Spring of 1848 spread these notions across Europe, planting the seeds of liberalism and nationalism. The Industrial Revolution, based on the emergent principles of capitalism, brought expanded prosperity but also new forms of exploitation and inequality. Marxism was a reaction to the excesses of capitalism and led in two directions: toward socialism and social democracy in much of Western Europe, and toward communist revolution in Russia. The Darwinian revolution transformed both science and religion and changed the way we think about human beings and their place on the planet.

By 1900, then, most of the ideas and movements that have shaped contemporary Europe were in place. But so many radical changes in the nineteenth century had unleashed forces that could not be contained in the old system. Nationalism was shaking the foundations of the European empires at the same time that it was forging powerful new states like Germany. These forces erupted in the cataclysm of the two world wars, with the first leading almost inexorably to the second. These wars were different from any that had gone before, with new military technologies and mass armies causing unprecedented death and destruction. For the first time in warfare, civilians became deliberate, even primary, targets, with massive aerial bombardments of London, Berlin, Tokyo, and Hiroshima. During the war and before, totalitarian dictatorships in Russia, Germany, and Italy brought misery and terror even to their own populations. The world wars also brought two new players into the game of European politics: the United States and the Soviet Union. The conflicting interests and ideologies of these two powers were muted in the years between the two world wars, as the United States retreated into isolation and the new communist state wrestled with war, civil war, collectivization, and famine. With the defeat and occupation of Germany at the end of World War II, though, these two states emerged as global superpowers and dominating forces in Europe. At the same time, the major European powers were recovering from wartime devastation and shedding their empires.

The Cold War began in Europe, and it divided Europe for the next half century. Eastern Europe became more integrated under the hegemony of the Soviet Union, and Western Europe moved toward economic and political union, but the two halves of the Continent moved apart from each other, separated by Churchill’s “iron curtain.” The next great revolutions, the peaceful ones of 1989–1991, brought an end to communism in Europe, to the Cold War, and to the division of Europe. Under the banner of the expanding European Union (EU), Europe finally had the chance to be united, free, prosperous, and at peace. A united and stable Europe, though, raised new questions about the status and role of both Russia and the United States. Russia’s place in Europe had always been somewhat conflicted and ambivalent. On the one hand, Russia historically had claimed to be the Third Rome, had played a major role in the Concert of Europe and the defeat of Napoleon, and had been a deciding factor in the beginning of World War I and the ending of World War II. On the other hand, Russia was always somewhat apart from Europe both geographically and culturally, and with the communist revolution of 1917, the country deliberately distanced itself from the “bourgeois West.” After the collapse of communism in the 1990s, Russia under Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin remained wary of the eastward march of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EU. Putin asserted in 2003 that “by their mentality and culture, the people of Russia are Europeans.” Even so, Russia’s commitment to democratic politics and market economics seemed less certain than in the more Western post communist states. It was clear that the Eastern European countries’ enthusiasm to join NATO and the EU was partly as protection against Russia. So, in many respects, Europe seemed to be edging away from Russia. At the same time, Europe’s relationship with the United States was becoming more ambivalent, too. The United States, like Russia, had a checkered history of relations with Europe. Although enormous cultural, religious, economic, and political influences crisscrossed the Atlantic, the United States maintained its isolationist distance from Europe up until World War I. But during the twentieth century, the United States played a decisive role in Europe, twice intervening to end world wars, rebuilding Western Europe after World War II, and intervening militarily in the Balkans in the 1990s. Even during the postwar North Atlantic alliance, though, some tensions existed between the United States and Europe, with the French in particular resenting U.S. political, economic, and cultural hegemony on the Continent.

The end of the Cold War brought a new configuration of power in world politics and in Europe. The United States was now the sole superpower, and with this came a certain triumphalism in the United States and a tendency toward arrogance and unilateralism. The United States backed away from a number of international treaties considered important by the Europeans (like the Kyoto Treaty on carbon emissions and the International Criminal Court). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought widespread sympathy for the United States from Europe, but the Bush administration lost most of that support two years later by ignoring the United Nations and brushing aside French, German, and Russian objections in its decision to make war against Iraq. Massive protest demonstrations against the war in almost every European capital even threatened to bring down governments (like those in Britain and Spain) that had supported the U.S. war. A few months after the war began, a survey of people in the fifteen EU countries revealed that over half of them believed the United States constituted a threat to world peace. It seemed that Europe was also growing apart somewhat from the United States. The election of Barack Obama as U.S. president sparked an immediate upturn in European views of the United States and in U.S.-European relations, due to Obama’s more internationalist and conciliatory approach to other countries. However, the advent of the new U.S. administration coincided with a collapse in the United States financial sector and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. America’s global reputation, already battered by the war in Iraq, suffered further, and seemed to open the way for the emergence of new global powers, among them China and the EU.

In a world in which “soft power” was becoming more important than hard, military, power, the EU had the world’s biggest economy and was, by far, the world’s biggest trading power. It was a global economic powerhouse. The distancing of Europe from both Russia and the United States was a function both of the decline of those Cold War superpowers and the increasing strength and confidence of Europe. Western Europe had weaned itself from the predominant influence of the United States, Eastern Europe had thrown off Soviet domination, and together they were demonstrating their autonomy and self-sufficiency. For much of the modern era, the peoples of Europe had been oppressed by kings or tyrants, devastated by wars or revolutions, or dominated by outside powers. For the first time in their history, they had the liberty presaged by the French Revolution, the equality offered by socialism, and the solidarity promised by a united Europe.