West Europe

“ They show the fundamental opposition between East and West Europe, an opposition which becomes of world-significance when we remember that the line through Germany which History indicates as the frontier between East and West is the very line which we have on other grounds taken as demarking the Heartland in the strategical sense from the Coastland.
In West Europe there are two principal elements, the Romance and the Teutonic. As far as the two chief nations, Britain and France, are concerned, there is and can be in modern times no question of conquest of the one by the other. ”

“ And then first the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of the earth’s surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe became a province in a gigantic whole. Thenceforward the history of the Western Culture has a planetary character.
Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. ”

“ Throughout its history, until the wars of 1914-45, western civilization had its headquarters in central and west Europe, with branch offices elsewhere on the planet. At no time after 1870 did any one European power occupy a position of easy superiority over its rivals. If Great Britain was top dog, France, the long established continental power was snapping at her heels. Germany was an expanding power of major consequence. To the North and East lay Russia, with its vast territories and its persistent pressures into East Europe and Far Asia. ”

“ By the above definition, Europe and North America are understood as the active, peripheral forces revolving around whatever stable, passive and irremovable it is that occupies the core of the human universe - like the two hands molding a precious vase. ”

“ From the Eastern point of view, the distant peripheral Europe and America had the historical sense of mission to manipulate the East – the core. In physics, the core is always the most passive, most unwavering element. Passive and unwavering is how the West perceives the East. ”

“ Distinctions of class, profession, or nationality, entering so largely into European life, separating man from man, lose their hold upon Europeans meeting in the distant East. The great [Pg 288] West, seen at that distance, becomes their common country; they are drawn together by the bond of common views, feelings and modes of thought which obliterate the artificial lines of nationality—nay, they feel for, and treat each other as only blood relations and brothers would in Europe. ”

“ GROWTH OF THE NATIONS THE NEW NATIONALISM The map of western Europe, that is, of Europe west of the great Russian plain and the Balkan peninsula, shows this part of the continent at present divided into no less than thirteen separate and independent nations. ”

“ This has given Europe a character exactly opposite to that of Asia: its North and its South are united, its East and its West; they are not like antagonistic poles, but extend to each other friendly hands. ”

“ Ye who are versed in politics, and study the rise and fall of empires, and know what is good for civilised man and what is bad for him, or, in other words, what will make him happy and what will make him miserable--tell us how comes it that Europe has lost almost her last acre in the boundless expanse of territory which she so lately possessed in the West, and still contrives to hold her vast property in the extensive regions of the East? ”

“ Central and eastern Europe also provide a natural land nexus between west Europe and Asia and the Middle East. As China and India grow in economic and geopolitical importance, an enlarged Europe will find itself in the profitable role of an intermediary between east and west. ”

“ What is not a speculation is that Europe never turned enough attention to were it gets more complicated: the religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom of the East. Or better, that religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom that had been created by the East, which had not been created by the West. ”

“ It is when we come into south-eastern Europe, that is, in a large part of the Austro-Hungarian and in the whole of the Ottoman dominions, that we come to those phenomena of geography, race, and language, which stand out in marked contrast with anything to which we are used in western Europe. We may perhaps better understand what those phenomena are, if we suppose a state of things which sounds absurd in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East. ”

“ They rise within thirty miles of each other, [3-1] and each runs, not counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,—the Vistula to the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,—and, more deeply looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called—Europa's own, and Jove's,—the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural ”

“ The demographic changes in Europe are irreversible, and the former feelings of Western superiority – the analytical mind, the linear approach to time and history, the soul of the conqueror, the deductive ways – over the time will proportionally decrease in favor of a newly felt Eastern superiority – the intuitive mind, the holistic approach to time and entangled history, the soul of the sage, the inductive ways. ”

“ Then and before the Great Wars, who could ever possible unite all Europeans in order to face the civilizations of the East? The Englishman always knew what was Right, it was not Right for them to set foot on the continent, nor to aspire rule over Europe. In Europe, they made no great leaders either. ”

“ At times we are content to look down upon the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long ago at least as wild as they seem to be now. But we must also guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one. {9} We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe not as undeveloped West, but as diverse. ”

“ For though the West was gradually declining intellectually on account of the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions which followed in its train, there were signs of progress in the East which, feeble at first, was destined in the course of several centuries to illumine the whole of Europe with its enlightening rays. ”

“ Most of the maritime cities of the West not only got rich by furnishing Europe with the productions of the East, but they found further a considerable advantage in the transport of pilgrims and Christian armies. ”

“ In the East there are the Russians, a big, indeed the biggest, nation of Europe. It is a peculiar circumstance that the outskirts of this nation are non-Russian: on its West side there are some small nations of the Central Zone, while in the North, in the Caucasus and on its Asiatic frontiers, there are also several small nations and fragments of nations. ”

“ The rational, analytic, deductive Western Germans, consciously or unconsciously indulged into the spiritual misson to make Europe ‘coherent’, and ‘uniform’ – they wanted to easter-fy it. By doing that, by adopting the inductive Eastern ways, some historians believe German orientalism had “helped to destroy Western self-satisfaction, and to provoke a momentous change in the culture of the West: the relinquishing of Christianity and classical antiquity as universal norms” (Marchand, 2001) . ”

“ Science and industry, in the first place, made the conquest and organisation of the world easy. In the first stages of the expansion of Europe the material superiority of the West had unquestionably afforded the means whereby its political ideas and institutions could be made operative in new fields. The invention of ocean-going ships, the use of the mariner's compass, the discovery of the rotundity of the earth, the development of firearms—these were the things which made possible the creation of the first European empires ”

“ There is no need for a more minute classification of states from the nationalist point of view. It will be enough to indicate the remarkable difference between the East and West of Europe in the relationship between state and nationality. In the West we have a greater number of states, the majority of which, as regards the extent of their territory, and the number of their population, belong to the category of the bigger states. We find in them a certain proportion of national minorities, most of which have no political claims. ”

“ In the West are found greater nations and also greater states (the only small nations are Holland, Belgium, Portugal) ; in the East are smaller states formed of parts of small nations (Roumania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece) , and Austria-Hungary and Turkey which were composed of many small nations and states formerly independent. Russia contains a large number of small nations and formerly independent states, but as in contrast to Austria-Hungary and Turkey, it contains a great numerical superiority of the so-called ruling nation. ”

“ The great peninsula of the West has much in common with the great peninsula of the North. ♦Slight relations with the Empire.♦ Save Sweden and Norway, no part of Western Europe has had so little to do with the later Empire as Spain. ♦Break between earlier and later history.♦ And in no land that formed part of the earlier Empire, save our own island, is the later history so completely cut off from the earlier history. The modern kingdoms of Spain have still less claim to represent the West-Gothic kingdom than the modern kingdom of France had to represent the Frankish kingdom. ”

“ The schools of the Muslim world were so far advanced that even to-day the West resounds with the fame of the great teachers of the Universities of Bagdad, Cairo and Granada. The West had its dark age before it came in touch with the East, and the European Renaissance started after the first contact Europe had with the Orient. Whereas the East had its dark age after it came into touch with the West, and decadence in the Orient set in after its first contact with Europe. ”

“ In short, the object of an introduction to mediæval and modern European history is the description of the most significant achievements of western civilization during the past fifteen hundred years,—the explanation of how the Roman Empire of the West and the wild and unknown districts inhabited by the German races have become the Europe of Gladstone and Bismarck, of Darwin and Pasteur. ”

“ These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe. ”

“ We find also that in place of the principle of 'one region, one language', which applies broadly in the west, there is nearly always a minority language alongside the majority one. The 1914-18 crisis has shown how very unstable were the political units of the last fifty years, and the 'nation-state', that is a settled administration worthy of the name of 'state' combined with a social unit based upon tradition, has only just begun its career in Eastern Europe. ”

“ The intermingling of peoples and the difference of tradition between town and country over wide areas are in part the cause of this, but it has also been suggested that, in the east of Europe, we have still surviving an earlier stage of the process of settlement in the cleared forest than farther west, while in the south-east {89} we note the persistence of elements still hardly settled at all. ”

“ The difference between the West and Russia, as far as nationality and politics are concerned, has already been pointed out; in the West there are many nations and States; Russia has many nations, but forms one State. On a territory not larger though more densely populated, the West is a political organisation of numerous and highly cultured old nations; it represents politically, economically and culturally a more intensive organisation, a more intensive employment of all cultural forces, whereas Russia is still at the stage of extensiveness. ”

“ The process of change, we realize, has progressed faster and farther in the west than in the east of Europe, which goes forward against the pressure of severe inhibitions that make its problems differ from our own. ”

“ The old countries of the East, with their worn-out civilization and worn-out soil, offered no inducements comparable with the barbarous but young and fertile West, where to the ecclesiastic the most lovely and inviting lands were open. ”

“ In the West there are no acute disturbing national questions: the nations of the West have their states and well-established forms of government, they have their old civilisation—France and Belgium will have to rebuild their destroyed cities and villages, to repair their factories and fields, but in the East new states, new forms of governments must be created and the foundation of civilised life must be laid down. ”