EUROPE’S contributions to the world, though enormous, are highly contentious. We have just seen Peter Brook’s play Eleven and Twelve, in which one tribal character says to another “There is my truth, there is your truth, and there is The Truth”. So I cranked up my space-time-continuum search engine, opened a portal called Europe, and asked Knowledge for “The Truth”.
“You need to refine your search criteria” he said. “I suggest the following filters: Start with WHAT happened and WHEN. Historians will tell you all this. If you ask HOW and WHY, historians will usually refer you to politics and religion. If this goes over your head, try more down-to-earth explanations from social anthropology and economics. The problem has been described as a “series of dynastic squabbles over real estate”, and the solution as a ”maximum of personal liberty combined with common ownership of the raw material of the planet”.
“Thank you” I said “But how should I approach Europe’s legacy to the rest of the world?”
“Europe’s legacy really started to take shape when simple farming communities evolved into what anthropologists call tributary societies. At this point elites who controlled resources could extract tribute. Thus, for the right to use land, a lord collected feudal dues, a church collected tithes, a colony captured slave labour and extracted resource rents, and an empire taxed its subjects. I suggest you start with the damage that Europe’s empires inflicted on itself and on the world. But if you want to evaluate the positive contributions to culture, science and social justice, I suggest you widen “Europe” to mean “The West”. Later on, when you want to compare the West with other regions, the Orient for example, I will suggest a template, a set of simple tools drawn from social anthropology and economics.
SOME NEGATIVE LEGACIES
Empires attract predators, each one invading and creating a new empire. Thus, in Europe, the Roman Empire was superseded by the Byzantine and the Arab-Islamic empires before waves of invasions surged across Europe for nearly two thousand years. Each created a new empire out of war: Frankish, Carolingian, Swedish, Hungarian, Holy Roman, Hapsburg, Ottoman and Napoleonic. Each suffered internal conflict over the carve-up of the land between rival aristocracies, and between the aristocracy and the monasteries which were exempt from tax. At the bottom of the heap, separated by a huge wealth gap, the peasants were often in revolt, sometimes leading to bloody revolutions. There was only one that caused no bloodshed, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which the crown of England was given to a Dutch Protestant, simply because the English alternative was an unpopular Catholic.
And from 1714 to 1901 the crown of England, and therefore much of the English Empire, belonged to a German dynasty, as the Economist reminded us on 22 Oct 1994.
“The current royal family, like the Hanovarians before them, are as much German as British. In
fact George V invented the family name Windsor (after his favourite castle) in 1917 at the height of the first world war when the family’s real name, Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, had caused grumbling. When the Kaiser heard of this he demanded, in a rare flash of wit, a staging of that famous opera, The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha.”
Meanwhile new kinds of empires were absorbing territorial conquests far beyond Europe: the German, French, Dutch, British, Spanish and Portuguese. These new empires were not small, at one time half of Africa was owned by France. They led to oppression of the peoples subjugated and to conflict between empires, including World Wars One and Two. As Edward Said noted in his monumental Culture and Imperialism: “The main battle in imperialism is over land.”
The Crusades. All over Europe, popes and bishops were in conflict with princes and kings: which side should collect the rent and, more importantly, how to get it from the rising tide of starving peasants and beggars unable to pay it. Through the main channels of propaganda, the pulpits, the idea of the “Peoples Crusades” was preached. Palestine would be liberated, a social problem would be exported, and looting along the way made it self-funding. It was win-win. “Could any prince object to enhanced moral status gained by ‘taking the Cross’? Did not nobles who remained at home profit from the departure of their rivals for Palestine? And were not aristocrats with few acres and many sons pleased that the Pope now sanctioned abroad the practice of looting?” Even feudal rights were being exported when four French knights established Latin estates in Palestine. (Robert Cole A Traveller’s History of France).
Slavery has always existed and, even today, there are 27 million slaves world-wide. But, in a brutal chapter of Europe’s history tens of millions of Africans, mainly men, were exported and sold like animals, mostly to the New World. Within Africa, in the Belgian Congo male slaves were moved hundreds of kilometres to work in the mines. 30,000 tribal societies were arbitrarily lumped together into the longitudes and latitudes of some two dozen European colonies. Sociologists trace many of Africa’s current problems to these events.
In the country where I grew up, Guyana, slavery was officially abolished in 1807, practised unofficially for a while and then reinvented under the title of “Indentured Labour”. Bengalis, impoverished by the Indian caste system, were shipped to Guyana as cheap labour for the colonial system. A descendant of this system, Cheddi Jagan, was the first prime minister, an idealist elected on a land reform platform that would have pulled the country out of poverty. The British government, under pressure from the US government, immediately jailed him. A descendant of the original slave system, Forbes Burnham, who had taught me French at high school, was then approved by the British government and elected as the second prime minister. A ruthless pragmatist, he and his cronies went on to do very well out of real estate and, as a result, the country lapsed into economic ruin.
World War One. In the last part of the 19th century Europe was enmeshed in two sets of territorial disputes, one over colonies the other over the Balkans. The first set involved Britain and Germany over Southern Africa, Britain and France over Egypt, and France and Germany over Morocco.
Protection of the shipping lanes along which the wealth of Africa was being extracted had already led to the development of the European battleships, always seeking employment. Though the need for raw materials was increasing (the population of Germany doubled during this period), armed conflict was postponed by the powerful dynastic family networks that were similarly extracting the wealth of Europe (for example, most European emperors and princes were related to Queen Victoria).
The other set of territorial disputes, between Russian, Austrian and Ottoman desires to carve up the Balkans, was not papered over by equivalent family interests. Hence, when an Austrian archduke was shot, Austria jumped the gun, so to speak, and declared war on Serbia. The rest of Europe then joined in the land grab that “slew half the seed of Europe one by one” (Wilfred Owen).
World war Two. The political settlements after World War One deprived Germany, with few natural resources of its own, of its European and African territories, creating tension. Round the other side of the world, embargos on trade with Japan, also with few natural resources of its own, also created tension. As that prolific writer Anon once said “Where goods cannot pass, armies will”. The costs of the war that then erupted were enormous, and felt all round the world. However, since we are now going to look at Europe’s positive legacies, it has been claimed that the West, in defeating the Axis and then communism, saved the world from domination by two master races and one totalitarian ideology. And, arising from the horrors of war, the creation of the United Nations kick-started initiatives for human rights, conflict resolution, and aid to the under-developed third world.
POSITIVE LEGACIES
The Cultural Explosion started with Greek drama and architecture and continued up through the renaissance to today’s Western export of mass culture to the globe. The power of Greek drama waited two thousand years to be eclipsed by Shakespeare. Here is the nightwatchman, in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, waiting for the signal that Troy has fallen and watching “The nightly conference of the stars, studding the sky with beauty” but “Sleep’s enemy, fear, stands guard beside me, to forbid my eyes one instant’s closing”. Greek plays are still being interpreted . For example, on our hard drive Pasolini’s film of The Medea by Euripides invokes anthropology to create stunning images of rites of spring set among the fairy chimneys of Cappadochia. Having recently read The Eumenides I am reminded of that quip “Euripides trousers, Eumenides trousers”.
In the days when a family could squat, like gypsies, on the ruins of Mycenae, we were able to collect those colourful shards of Greek pottery. The Greeks invented the classical geometry around which we all hiked at the Acropolis and Delphi, clean vertical columns topped with scrolls and flat triangular pediments, a minimum of decoration to detract from the harmony. At around the same time the Etruscans invented the huge semi-circular arches we walked under daily in Perugia. The Romans perfected this shape and layered strings of arches, one above the other, as we saw near Uzes, to carry water across steep valleys. If you rotate the arch around its Y-axis you get a dome. Using an early form of concrete, the Romans developed the dome, building the Pantheon which, until the 20th century, was the largest poured concrete dome in existence. The Byzantine domes in Turkey’s huge mosques are slightly flattened, those of the Renaissance, Brunellesci’s in Florence, Michaelangelo’s in Rome and Christopher Wren’s in London are slightly pointed. Tim’s laboratory overlooked the rough arches of the1000-year-old Saxon church at Bradford-on-Avon, but by Norman times the arch was almost back to Roman smoothness, therefore called Romanesque. In Padua we saw how the arch, if projected along its Z-axis, could create barrel-vaulting
Then came the vertical eruption of tall columns, pointed arches and fan vaulting called Gothic in Europe and, more practically, Perpendicular in England. Where the climate was kind, decoration was by beautiful pale frescoes. It harsher climates decoration had to be carved stone to last, as in Chartres cathedral. The purpose of both forms of decoration was to illustrate the bible for people, at a time before the printing press when few people could read. The frescoes, though two-dimensional, were encouraging experiments with colour, and the acoustics of these tall churches were encouraging singing, but in Latin not the vernacular. So far, then, the architecture was formal, precise and of simple beauty. The paintings were two-dimensional and the music mono-phonic, and both almost exclusively religious.
But then the next cultural explosion, the Renaissance, added polyphony to what had been called plainsong, added a third dimension to painting in what is called perspective, and spilled architectural brilliance beyond the cathedrals into the magnificent palaces of the Loire valley and the Grand Canal of Venice. This huge flow of creative energy poured also into science and technology, and into a ferment of intellectual debate about ideas of social justice.
If Humanism was a threat to the institution of the established church the Reformation was a frontal attack. The counter-attack consisted of the Inquisition, the Counter-reformation and, almost accidentally, a style of architecture called the Baroque. Where the Reformation had stripped much of the religious decoration from churches, the Baroque over-reacted with elaborate sculpture and ornate frills in an effort to recapture lost congregations. Geometric simplicity was now cluttered with exuberant scrolls, coils and statuesque embellishment. “Baroque is the ultimate of the bizarre, it is the ridiculous carried to extremes”. It creeps up the walls of Bath Abbey distracting the eye from the perfect fan vaulting above. It hangs on the tombs of bishops, statues of Popes and plaques commemorating town counsellors high up on walls which need no decoration. Baroque architecture was a mistake and architects since have mostly gone back via Neo-classical, Neo-Romanesque, Neo-Gothic, and Neo-Renaissance to the geometrical perfections of the past. . Palladio copied the Greeks and institutional buildings have copied Palladio ever since.
But no account of Europe’s legacy is complete without a mention of Cricket. Here you have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he come in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When both sides have been in and out including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.
The explosion of science and technology also started with the Greeks, was nursed by Islam through Europe’s Dark Ages, and has flowered in the West ever since. The principles of scientific enquiry have now pervaded the social sciences and, via neuroscience, now exploring the boundaries of the mind and the soul.
Ideas about social justice also started in Greece, with experiments in democracy. These were then heavily influenced by the ideology of the Christian New Testament, by the European Enlightenment, and by more recent philosophies helping to define human rights. JS Mill’s vision of the future : “the maximum of personal liberty combined with common ownership of the raw material of the globe” unfortunately remains elusive.
CONCLUSION.
What then are the costs and benefits of Europe’s legacy? Is there a net positive balance? Attempts have been made by poor countries to claim compensation for the damage made by rich countries, but measurements of these values, and their erosion by time, has proved difficult, to say the least. Let us revisit these questions later, after exploring the worlds beyond Europe.
POSTSCRIPT. Some of the social problems encountered on my journeys demand the sort of analysis that might sometimes seem over-technical for travel memoirs. Responding to subtle hints from the family, from now on I will park these out of the main stream of reminiscences in appendices, that may be read or not.